ANC adopts the Youth League Programme of Action

ANC adopts the Youth League Programme of Action

On 17 December 1949, the African National Congress (ANC) adopted a Programme of Action at its 1949 December conference, which marked one of the most important turning points in the history of the Organisation’s existence up to that time. The adoption was precipitated by the victory of the National Party the year before and its determination to implement a policy of apartheid. However, the primary reason behind the adoption of the Programme of Action was the coming into existence of the ANC Youth League, on 10 September 1944.

The idea of the formation of the ANC youth league started in 1943, in Orlando, Soweto, at Walter Sisulu’s house, by Anton Lembede, A.P. Mda, Jordan Ngubane, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. Its founders felt that ANC was dominated by an older generation who were conservative and could not relate to the youth and the changing circumstances of the liberation struggle. According to these young militants, the “older generation” had used deputations and delegations to try to get the colonial government to grant equal rights to all, but it became increasingly clear that this tactic was ineffective.

The ANC, inspired by the desire to achieve national freedom, was transformed in the following decade from being an organisation led by middle class liberals who believed that they could, through persuasion, wring concessions from the White government, into a militant liberation movement. The Programme of Action, which advocated a more militant approach to protesting colonialism and apartheid, called on the ANC to embark on mass action, involving civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and other forms of non-violent resistance, similar to the 1946 Passive resistance campaign mounted by the South African Indian Congress (SAIC).

In 1952, the young guard in the ANC, led by Anton Lembede, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, in alliance with the SAIC, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the Coloured Peoples’ Congress, embarked on a Defiance Campaign. This was the first major non-violent resistance campaign jointly mounted by the Black, including the so-called Coloured and Indian, communities and a small group of White left-wing activists as a result of the adoption of the Programme of Action.

In the 1940s the ANC revitalised itself and began to work more closely with the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), putting behind the antagonistic relationship between the two parties that had transpired in the 1920s and 1930s. Two significant developments took place in the ANC in the 1940s: for the first time women were admitted as full members of the ANC in 1943, leading to the establishment of the ANC Women’s League; and the ANC Youth League was formed in 1944, becoming part of the recognised structures of the Movement.

During this period, passive but militant resistance campaigns were woven into the broader struggle for freedom. Many more people moved to the cities in the 1940s to work in new factories and industries. They began to from their own community organisations – such as the Squatter’s Movement – and trade unions. The militant ideas of the Youth League quickly found support among the new population of the cities. At the end of the 1940s decade, the ANC adopted the ‘Programme of Action’, which proposed the abandonment of moderate methods – such as petitions and deputations to the settler colonial government – in favour of radical mass action.

The Programme of Action had been drawn up by a sub-committee of the Youth League composed of David Bopape, Peter AP Mda, Nelson Mandela, James Njongwe, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. Leadership changes in the ANC at the end of the decade were largely influenced by a desire for a more aggressive stance towards an increasingly racist government. In the country’s Whites-only elections held in 1948, the National Party seized power and set in motion plans to implement apartheid. To ensure its implementation, the membership replaced older leaders with a number of younger men. Consequently, Dr A.B Xuma was replaced as President-General of the ANC by Dr J.S. Moroka, and Walter Sisulu was elected Secretary-General.

“The fundamental principles of the Programme of Action were inspired by the desire to achieve national freedom”. By national freedom the ANC meant “freedom from White domination and the attainment of political independence; the rejection of the conception of segregation, apartheid, trusteeship, or white leadership which were all, in one way or another, motivated by the idea of white domination or domination of the Whites over the Black people”, who were the majority in South Africa. Like all other people, the African people claimed the right of self-determination in their own country.

In 1943, through the influence of the young members of the ANC, who were critical of what they considered its passivity, formed their own organisation, the Congress Youth League (CYL). Anton Lembede, president of the ANCYL from 1944 until his death in 1947, stressed that South Africa was “a black man’s country”, in which the concerns of Africans should take precedence. After the war and Lembede’s death, and faced by the implementation of apartheid, the ANCYL’s leaders, Peter Mda, Jordan Ngubane, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu, strove to take charge of the ANC.

Overcoming the opposition of the then ANC President Alfred Xuma, the ANCYL succeeded in 1949 in electing James Moroka to the presidency; placing three ANCYL members (Sisulu, Tambo, and Mandela) on the party’s national executive body; and persuading the Congress formally to adopt the Programme of action. These were the beginnings of what had been profoundly referred to as a period “FROM PROTEST TO CHALLENGE!” The Programme of Action was confrontational. It called for sacrifices on the part of the liberation movement.

Articulating the purpose of this stance, Inkosi Albert Luthuli maintained that “This programme was a direct outcome of a conviction that had been growing among the people that the white people in South Africa had no intention of extending democratic rights to the non-whites. The discriminatory laws that disgrace the statute books of successive white governments from colonial times to the present day are proof enough of the white man’s hostility to the progress of Africans and non-white people in general. The Act of Union itself put the non-whites outside the orbit of enjoying citizenship rights in a supposedly democratic, civilised and Christian country” (Voices of Liberation, pp. 83 – 84).

Sources:
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African National Congress, “38th National Conference Programme of Action: Statement of Policy Adopted”, African National Congress, 17 December 1949, ANC Archives: https://www.anc1912.org.za/policy-documents-1949-38th-national-conference-programme-of-action-statement-of-policy-adopted/
Mary Benson, “The African Patriots, the Story of the African National Congress of South Africa”, Faber and Faber, 1963.
Michael Dingake, “My Fight Against Apartheid”, Kliptown Books, 1987.
SAHA, “Tracing the Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa”, South African History Archive, 1988.
ANCYL, “The Heroic Rebirth of the ANC Youth League”, African National Congress Youth League Publication, 27 October 1990.
Department of Education South Africa, “Footprints in the Sands of Time: Celebrating Events and Heroes of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in South Africa”, Department of Education, 2007.
Albert Luthuli, “Voices of Liberation”, Gerald Pillay: Human Sciences Research Council, 2012.
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Bernard ‘Ben’ Leeman, “Mandela, Sobukwe and Leballo: The South African Communist Party and the Pan Africanist Congress”, Self-published, 5 July 2016.

Castro Khwela
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