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 conservative older generation that 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, to 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 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 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. During this period, passive resistance campaigns were woven into the broader struggle for freedom.

At the end of the 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 mass action. Leadership changes that also occurred 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. These developments were largely influenced by White elections held in 1948, wherein the National Party seized power and set in motion plans to implement apartheid.

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 a majority in South Africa. Like all other people, the African people claimed the right to self-determination in their own country.

In 1943, through the influence of the young members of the ANC, 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 Second World War and after 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) in the Movement’s national executive body; and persuading the Congress Movement to formally adopt the Programme of Action. These were the beginnings of what had been profoundly referred to as a period “FROM PROTEST TO CHALLENGE!”

Castro Khwela
Good morning fellow Compatriots!