African National Congress

African National Congress (ANC), South African political party and Black nationalist organization. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it had as its main goal the maintenance of voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Black Africans in Cape Province. It was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. From the 1940s it spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination. The ANC was banned from 1960 to 1990 by the white South African government; during these three decades it operated underground and outside South African territory. The ban was lifted in 1990, and Nelson Mandela, the president of the ANC, was elected in 1994 to head South Africa’s first multiethnic government. The party received a majority of the vote in that election and every one after until 2024, when it saw its support plummet to about 40 percent.

Early decades

In the late 1920s the ANC’s leaders split over the issue of cooperation with the Communist Party (founded in 1921), and the ensuing victory of the conservatives left the party small and disorganized through the 1930s. In the 1940s, however, the ANC revived under younger leaders who pressed for a more militant stance against segregation in South Africa. The ANC Youth League, founded in 1944, attracted such figures as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Mandela, who galvanized the movement and challenged the moderate leadership. Under the presidency of Albert John Luthuli, the ANC after 1952 began sponsoring nonviolent protests, strikes, boycotts, and marches against the apartheid policies that had been introduced by the National Party government that came to power in 1948.

Party membership grew rapidly. A campaign against the pass laws (Black people were required to carry passes indicating their employment status) and other government policies culminated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952. In the process ANC leaders became a target of police harassment: in 1956 many of its leaders were arrested and charged with treason (known as the Treason Trial, 1956–59).

Move toward militancy

In 1960 the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which had broken away from the ANC in 1959, organized massive demonstrations against the pass laws during which police killed 69 unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg). At this point the National Party banned, or outlawed, both the ANC and the PAC. Denied legal avenues for political change, the ANC first turned to sabotage and then began to organize outside South Africa for guerrilla warfare. In 1961 an ANC military organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), with Mandela as its head, was formed to carry out acts of sabotage as part of its campaign against apartheid. Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 (the Rivonia Trial). Although the ANC’s campaign of guerrilla warfare was basically ineffective because of stringent South African internal security measures, surviving ANC cadres kept the organization alive in Tanzania and Zambia under Tambo’s leadership. The ANC began to revive inside South Africa toward the end of the 1970s, following the Soweto uprising in 1976, when the police and army killed more than 600 people, many of them children. About 1980 the banned black, green, and gold tricolor flag of the ANC began to be seen inside South Africa, and the country descended into virtual civil war during the 1980s.

Rise to power

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The administration of F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC in 1990, and its leaders were released from prison or allowed to return to South Africa and conduct peaceful political activities. Nelson Mandela, the most important of the ANC’s leaders, succeeded Oliver Tambo as president in 1991. Mandela led the ANC in negotiations (1992–93) with the government over transition to a government elected by universal suffrage. In April 1994 the party swept to power in the country’s first such election, winning more than 60 percent of the vote for seats in the new National Assembly. Mandela, who headed a government of national unity, was inaugurated as South Africa’s first Black president on May 10, 1994. After the withdrawal of the National Party from the government in 1996, the ANC entered into an alliance with its previous rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Mandela stepped down as ANC president in 1997, and in June 1999 his successor, Thabo Mbeki, became the second Black president of South Africa. The party celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2002 and continued its domination of South African politics.