African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Author: search.filters.author.Lodge, TomSubject: search.filters.subject.African National Congress

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    Political organisation and community protest: The African National Congress in the Rand Townships, 1955-1957
    (1978-03) Lodge, Tom
    This paper will examine three instances of African protest: the attempts to resist the removals in the Johannesburg western areas, the opposition to Bantu Education and the Alexandra bus boycott of 1957. It was hoped that analyses of these movements would throw some light on the relationship of organised nationalist opposition to the less formal resistance that sprung from economic pressures rather than clearly perceived political aspirations. To have examined in detail protest in which the ANC was not obviously involved, might have provided: a more useful focus but unfortunately information on the kind of ‘informal’ protest described below is difficult to obtain from the more obvious sources which for reasons of time the research for this paper had to be limited. However an examination of the three campaigns does provide some insight into the relationship between the ANC and local interests and the extent to which it succeeded in channeling and expressing popular grievances. This may help to correct distortions which have resulted from a tendency to analyze African political opposition purely from the perspective of the nationalist movement, considering it in isolation from the general socio-economic context of black politics. The history of the ANC in the 1950s heeds to be written from a local level: how did branches operate, how were they viewed in the local community, what particular interests did they represent, was there anything socially distinct about their membership, how were the local communities structured?
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    The creation of a mass movement: Strikes and defiance, 1950-1952
    (1981-08) Lodge, Tom
    During the 1940's under the stimuli of industrial action, communal protest and passive resistance and an increasingly repressive social and political climate, the African National Congress's leadership had reached the point of embracing a strategy based on mass action : the strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience entailed in the Programme adopted in Bloemfontein in 1949. The form this programme would assume was indefinite : the Programme of Action was a statement of principle rather than a detailed strategem. But the months following the December conference allowed little time for careful planning. In 1950 the Government began its first major offensive against organized African opposition : the Suppression of Communism Act was directed not solely at the Communist Party and left-wing multiracial trade union groupings; it sanctioned the persecution of any individual group or doctrine intended to bring "about any political, industrial, social or economic change ... by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts" or "encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non-European races of the Union.
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    The African National Congress comes home
    (1992-06-08) Lodge, Tom
    Two years of legal existence have enabled the ANC to acquire 900 branches, 500 000 signed-up members, a 20-storey office block in central Johannesburg, a fresh leadership, a democratic constitution, an elaborate administration, and an annual income which in 1990 topped R90-million. Its homecoming is consequently a story of considerable if uneven achievement. In February 1990, the ANC's leaders were suddenly confronted with the challenge of adapting an authoritarian and secretive movement formed by the harsh exigencies of exile to the requirements of a South African environment shaped by the tumultuous politics of the 1980s. Two years later, the process of changing the ANC into an organisation geared to open and democratic forms of popular mobilisation is far from complete. In 1992 the ANC still struggles to absorb and reconcile the experiences of three generations of leadership: the elderly veterans who emerged from decades of confinement on Robben Island; the middle-aged managers of an insurgent bureaucracy; and, finally, the youthful architects of the most sustained and widespread rebellion in South African history. ... To understand what the ANC has become in 1992, it is essential to know what kind of organisation it was in 1990. One way of doing this is through investigating its institutional structures and internal procedures. This is the approach which characterises most studies of the exile ANC during the 1980s. This literature depicts a most intricate and elaborate organisation which can be represented as an embryonic state - a ‘government-in-waiting’. It resembled a state in several respects.