The Congress Movement: Icu, Anc, Cp & Congress Alliance (Volume 3)

This study of the development of the national liberation movement in South Africa is in stark contrast to the frequent depictions of the history of the ANC by leading academics as fragmented, fractured, and discontinuous. Not only does Sylvia Naeme’s analyses disprove the belief that the ANC’s development has been episodic, several of the conclusions drawn point to its essential inner coherence. Crucial to the development of the congress movement was the search for an alliance strategy that would ensure the ANC its central role. Particularly striking, and essentially new, is the depiction of the various alliance partners–including the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Communist Party, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions–and their complicated interaction. The research, based on extensive primary and secondary sources including some 80 interviews dating back to the early 1960s, uniquely combines narrative and analysis. The Congress Movement invites the reader to engage in the fascinating development of the national liberation movement in South Africa in its formative period and uncovers its outstanding continuities as well as the considerable range of its methods. Volume 3 explores how the ANC emerges and steps into its primary role as a national liberation movement resulting from a complex process stretching from the 1920s to the beginning of the 1960s. A key theme in this context is the integral role of the then Congress Youth League leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo.