ANC celebrates its centenary trading on past glories
The South African president, Jacob Zuma, will be joined by foreign heads of state where it all began: a Wesleyan church in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein. At the stroke of midnight, he will step forward to light the “centenary flame” symbolising the resistance that gave hope to all of Africa.
The African National Congress, the oldest liberation movement on the continent, turns 100 years old on January 8.
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Under the black, green and gold banner reading “100 years of selfless struggle”, there will be much lionising of heroes such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. But in some quarters there will also be nostalgia for old certainties, a suspicion that today’s leaders do not measure up to the titans of old, and a fear that the party enters its second century tarnished and poised to tear itself apart.
“One hundred years should be the ANC’s biggest celebration, to have survived this long and be in government, but it’s now a party in crisis,” said William Gumede, author of Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. “It’s a bittersweet victory. This may be the pinnacle but now it’s all downhill.”
Symbolically perhaps, the ANC has been forced to covertly buy its own birthplace at a hugely inflated price so it can take centre stage in the commemorations. In July, it
spent R10-million of public funds to regain the Wesleyan church in Waaihoek from a man who acquired it for just R280 000 eight years ago. There is now a race to complete costly renovations before the centenary flame is lit.
The church stands in what used to be a black township in Bloemfontein in Free State province. It was here in 1912, before the death of Scott of the Antarctic and the sinking of the Titanic, that a gathering of businessmen, clergymen, journalists, lawyers and teachers held a political meeting that laid the foundations of the South African Native National Congress, renamed the ANC in 1923.
Unlikely DNA
The party’s cause came from unlikely DNA in the shape of Britain, and Mahatma Gandhi. The latter arrived in South Africa in 1893 and blazed a trail with resistance campaigns against colonial rule. “This was the progenitor in a sense of the ANC,” said Allister Sparks, a veteran journalist and political analyst.
Britain had angered the black activists and intellectuals by handing power to Afrikaners (descended from Dutch and German settlers) when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. “It was the betrayal of black people,” Sparks added. “This is the only instance when Britain granted independence to a minority group, because it was stricken with guilt about the Boer war.
“If one is looking for an original sin in the South African story, it was that. The granting of independence to the white minority created a problem that led to apartheid.”
