ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE ANC: DEBATING LIBERATION HISTORIES TODAY edited by Arianna Lissoni, Jon Soske, Natasha Erlank, Noor Nieftagodien and Omar Badsha (Saho/Wits)
THE IDEA OF THE ANC by Anthony Butler (Jacana Pocket Book)
South African History Online's (Saho's) substantial volume on the ANC already has two introductions, but it may be that Anthony Butler's little "pocket book", The Idea of the ANC, serves better as an entry point, being a short but comprehensive overview of the 100-year-old party's conception of its own historical role.
Of course, that conception has changed: the ANC of today, nearly two decades into governing South Africa, is not the same as the ANC of 1976, say, any more than the ANC of 1976 was the same as the ANC of 1960 or 1948.
Naturally, the ANC's own centenary celebrations offered a simplistic narrative of the party's history, emphasising its great age, asserting unbroken ideological continuity, and insisting on the unity of the "broad church" of the party.
This was the party line bruited throughout the ANC's centenary year, yet at the electoral conference in Mangaung, which brought that year to a tumultuous close, the party's "factionalisation" was not only more evident than ever, but those factions were also mobilised more thoroughly than ever before in the ANC's internal leadership battles.
Phil Bonner speaks of the ANC's "fragments" in his introduction to One Hundred Years of the ANC, the first of the two introductions (based on keynote lectures at the conference on which the book draws) that frame the book and its many, varying contributions. The other, by Joel Netshithenze, acknowledges the way in which the ANC has adapted to historical pressure, and asks: "How, in its theory and praxis, should the ANC define its identity and project itself into the future?"
The very title of Netshithenze's piece, A Continuing Search for Identity, must surely be provocative to those who paint the ANC as South Africa's sole and all-purpose saviour, destined to rule until Jesus comes back.
Bonner, as a historian, asks questions he feels need to be answered if we are to understand the ANC more fully: how, for instance, it survived times of "fracture and impotence", and how its internal politics work.
Netshithenze, as at least in part an ideologue of the party, wants to manage, conceptually, the "fragments" — what one might see as the varying ideological strands that define(d) the ANC's historical project.
He speaks, for instance, of the "chemistry" between the ANC and the South African Communist Party, while also reminding the reader of the ANC's adoption in 1943 of an essentially liberal Bill of Rights.
Elsewhere in the book, Norman Etherington and Natasha Erlank consider the deep Christian roots of another powerful strand in the ANC's DNA, a strand one could trace, further, through post-1994 institutions such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and into ideological formulations such as ubuntu.
Inevitably, for a collection of analytical essays rather than a single-author narrative, the focal depth of the essays in One Hundred Years of the ANC varies.
There are fine-grained studies such as Liz Gunner's analysis of the language used at Chief Albert Luthuli's funeral in 1967 (including an imbongi's reference to Afrikaners as "hairy rockspiders", which made me laugh), as well as more Olympian theoretical pieces such as Susan Booysen's consideration of how the ANC regenerates its power and legitimacy.
Two of the most interesting pieces, for me, were those relating to the early 1980s in the ANC's exile period and the internal repression that followed the Shishita crisis, when the Zambian government uprooted a coup plot and the ANC followed its lead by cracking down on indiscipline and mutinous tendencies in the camps of its armed wing. (Shishita means "clean-up", it appears, as in Operation Shishita.)
Hugh Macmillan points out in his account that Shishita was the second of two crises for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the first being in the late 1960s (when Chris Hani nearly lost his head). It is instructive to compare his account with that of Stephen Ellis in External Mission, his important recent study of the ANC's three decades in exile, as well as with Vladimir Shubin's recounting, here, of Mzwandile Piliso's story.
Shubin was one of the Soviet Union's key link men to the ANC and thus offers a unique insight into one person's involvement in particular (contested) events; that of Piliso, who essentially took the rap for the abuses inflicted in the ANC's camps in the early 1980s.
To read this account is not to crow about how the ANC was internally repressive and thus evil all along, or how it was corrupted by the communists, but to see how individuals acted or reacted in very tricky situations.
It is to try to understand, too, how ideological presuppositions shaped that behaviour — these are the kinds of questions we ask about our politicians in the present tense.
The "idea" of the ANC, in Butler's brief study, is framed in terms of three categories: power (or agency), unity, and liberation.
These are useful ways to come to terms with the material in the Saho compendium, material which, in its very diversity, contests a single, unifying historical narrative and provides a range of key "fragments" of the larger historical mosaic.