The AFRICAN National Congress secrets

The African National Congress (ANC) was created at Bloemfontein, SOUTH AFRICA, on January 8, 1912, to defend the rights of the nation’s black majority from dominant racist whites.

Its first campaign was limited to opposing passage of the 1913 Land Act, which barred black Africans from owning land in broadly defined “white areas” of South Africa. That effort failed, and the ANC stagnated until 1944 when a new and more militant ANC Youth League was organized by activists Nelson Mandela, Oliver

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Tambo, and Walter Sisulu. The revitalized ANC sponsored nonviolent mass action against South Africa’s increasingly racist legislation, forging an alliance to that end in 1947 with the Natal Indian Congress and the Transvaal Indian Congress.

In 1948, neofascist elements with ties to the lately defeated THIRD REICH organized South Africa’s National Party to inaugurate a sweeping system of apartheid (Afrikaans for “separateness” of the races), and the next four years saw black rights steadily erode on all fronts. In June 1952 the ANC joined other antiapartheid groups for a Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience, but that effort was scuttled in April 1953 by a new law banning protest meetings. In June 1955 a “Congress of the People” held at Kliptown, near Johannesburg, adopted the Freedom Charter that would henceforth serve as the primary document of opposition to apartheid.

Sweeping arrests in 1956 jailed 156 leaders of the ANC and allied groups, but all were acquitted at their “treason trial” in 1961. ANC leader Albert Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, but the ANC was soon outlawed in South Africa, its mem-

bers driven underground by accusations of TERROR-ISM and sedition.

Once banned from legitimate discourse, the ANC had no choice but to adopt armed struggle as a method to depose apartheid. In 1961, its leaders organized Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) to wage war against the racist power structure in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment, along with Walter Sisulu and other ANC leaders, at trial in 1964.

Oliver Tambo subsequently established the ANC’s government in exile, fielding an estimated force of 6,000 guerrillas from bases in ANGOLA, MOZAM-BIQUE, and ZAMBIA. The ANC forged close ties with the banned South African Communist Party, and its central party document, the Manifesto of the Azanian People, described the ANC’s primary goal as the destruction of “racial capitalism” in South Africa.

Three decades of struggle and repression climaxed on February 2, 1990, when President F.W. de Klerk lifted the ANC’s ban. Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and majority rule was restored to the nation in 1994. That April, the ANC won a landslide victory in South Africa’s first integrated election, to become the nation’s ruling party.

Mandela served as president until 1999, when he was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki. The ANC also holds an elected majority in eight of the country’s nine provinces.

A curious sideshow to mainstream activities involves the controversial career of Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife. Winnie Mandela was charged with attempted murder in 1991, following the disappearance of a young bodyguard whose torture and death she allegedly ordered. In the absence of a corpse, she was acquitted of the primary charge, but jurors convicted her of kidnapping. The court imposed a suspended sentence for that offense, but Mrs. Mandela’s legal problems continued. On April 25, 2003, she was convicted on 43 counts of fraud and 25 counts of theft, receiving a five-year prison term.

Court watchers predicted that she would serve a maximum of eight months in jail.