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Inheritance and invention: the case of the African National Congress Youth League after apartheid Raphaël Botiveau (Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Political science Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza – Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Paper presented at the “One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories and Democracy Today” Conference, Johannesburg, September 20-24, 2011 Introduction This paper is based on a research work conducted in 2005 as part of a Master’s degree at the University of Paris 1, sponsored by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and entitled: “The Avatars of the African National Congress Youth League: the Invention of a South African Youth Political Organisation (1987-2005).” In this work, which I never presented in South Africa, I explored the trajectory of what I will call the “new” ANCYL, that launched at the turn of the 1990s and still in existence, by contrast with the “old” one that had been founded 1944. I looked at the transition from the South African Youth Congress (SAYCO) to the “new” ANCYL, at the functioning and organisation of the new structure (from a political sociology point of view), and at its relationship with its “mother body,” the African National Congress (ANC). My thesis relied on a field research 1 composed of interviews with ex and then current members of the ANCYL, as well as on a set of SAYCO and ANCYL archives available at the University of the Witwatersrand 2. I am now doing research for my Ph.D. on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its role in the transformation of the mining industry after apartheid. 1. The full thesis is available online at http://www.univ-paris1.fr/IMG/pdf/BOTIVEAU.pdf Shortened versions were published in French ( Politique Africaine , no.104, December 2006, pp.81-102) and in English (IFAS, 2007 http://www.ifas.org.za/research/pdf/Cahiers-IFAS_10.pdf ). 2. They consist of two collections of SAYCO and ANCYL archives. The SAYCO collection covers a period running from 1987 to 1990 and the ANCYL compilation the years 1990 and 1991. Contemporary documents were also accessed at Luthuli House. 1 When I started that earlier research, accounts of the ANCYL were almost entirely dedicated to its bid for Jacob Zuma in the advent of the Polokwane Conference. Since then the Media virtually reduced their coverage to the life and achievements of the League’s current president Julius Malema. Moreover, it is generally and wrongly assumed that the ANCYL has always existed since 1944. In line with the conference’s aim to reflect on narratives of the struggle against “simplistic and elitist” versions of “liberation history,” I would like to give some historical depth to our understanding of today’s ANCYL. I am not referring here to the long or medium term history of the ANC, but rather to a moment in the negotiations that paved the way to the end of white minority rule in South Africa, in 1990-91. In doing so I will insist on two points: 1) the Youth League as we know it today is a recent organisation whose origins should be traced back to the late 1980s rather than to the 1940s (although the latter period plays a part insofar as the identity of present day organisation is concerned; and 2) I would like to underline the fact that the transition from SAYCO to the ANCYL, even though it was “desired” by militants from the former organisation, was not “natural” but a process which included contentious engagements between organised youth within South Africa and the returning ANC. The 1990s ANCYL: return of a “ghost” or creation of a “new” organisation? My first point regards the historicity of the contemporary ANCYL. While the ANC was never disbanded as an organization but forced to operate underground after it was banned, the ANCYL disappeared during the years of exile with only the much limited ANC Youth Section remaining, before it was relaunched, in South Africa, in 1990-91. The Youth Section, headed by Jackie Selebi, mainly consisted of a “desk” designed to welcome young exiles or to brief activists from the internal front. The contemporary organisation is therefore just as old as South Africa’s democracy. 2 The Youth League’s longer history is the story of successive political generations. It started in 1944 when a handful of talented young professionals decided to organise themselves both inside and on the margins of the ANC. They came to be known as the “Class of ’44” in reference to the year in which the well-known ancestor of present day ANCYL was formed. Around the charismatic figure of Anton Lembede and his philosophy of African Nationalism 3, future leaders such as Peter Mda, Jordan Ngubane, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela or Oliver Tambo formed the organisation that would soon take control of the ANC, turn it in a mass- based movement and radicalise its action in the face of growing state repression. A shared political consciousness and experience, close professional trajectories and personal ties formed around an often common Eastern Cape origin, place of living – Soweto – and of working – Johannesburg, turned them into a social “generation.” 4 They can also be viewed as constituting an “intellectual generation.” 5 A shared opposition to the political orientations of older ANC leaders embodied at the time by President Albert Bitini Xuma, who were perceived as politically outdated, created the conditions for a “generation gap” 6 that brought on a leadership change in and deep transformation of the ANC. Their alliance was therefore not mainly based on their youthful condition for this group of young men was composed of family heads in their 40’s who were practically old-enough to be grandfathers 7. As Edward Feit noted, “the political clash of generations is seldom clearcut. In this case, a majority of the youth and the aged allied against an aging leadership and a minority of the young.” 8 The decisive moment in their alliance came in 1949 when James Moroka defeated Xuma with the 3. Robert R. Edgar, Luyanda ka Msumza (Ed.), Freedom in our lifetime: the collected writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede , Athens (Ohio), Johannesburg, Ohio University Press, Skotaville Publishers, Mayibuye Books, 1996 (xx, 203p.). 4. Karl Mannheim, Le problème des générations , Paris, Armand Colin, 2005 (122p.). 5. Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle : khâgneux et normaliens dans l'entre-deux-guerres , Paris, Fayard, 1988 (721p.). 6. Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment. A study of the generation gap , New York, Natural History Press, 1970 (xvii, 113p.). 7. Tom Lodge, personal interview with the author, 12 April 2005. 8. Edward Feit, “Generational Conflict and African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1949- 1959,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies , vol. 5, no.2, 1972, pp.181-202, p.183. 3 support of the ANCYL. He became the new president of the ANC with Sisulu as his Secretary General. As opposed to its historical ancestor, the “new” ANCYL, which was officially formed in 1990, came from a much different background. At a time in which youth, militancy and political violence were often assimilated 9, the contemporary youth wing of the ANC would emerge out of the combined experiences of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS, created in 1979) on the one hand, and of the mass mobilisation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) 10 on the other hand, whose youth component relied on local Youth congresses in the townships. Those congresses were gathered under the umbrella of SAYCO, which was launched in 1987 in Cape Town. Its leader Peter Mokaba had attended the “Robben Island University”11 and he belonged to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). With the ANC’s unban in 1990, SAYCO took the initiative to relaunch the Youth League. After this brief historical summary I would like to stress the fact that such a process of organisational maturing and (re)creation was for the least ambiguous. The transition experienced within organised youth was indeed concomitant with the broader context of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Among former youth activists there is a tendency to “naturalise” the transition from SAYCO to the ANCYL, as illustrated by the following statement of one former ANCYL Provincial Secretary: “So it was a movement from CAYCO [the Cape Youth Congress], a transition you see from CAYCO to SAYCO, from SAYCO to the ANCYL. […] Our participation in the transition of the Youth League as I said was automatic in the sense that we were branches and structures of the ANC Youth League but under the banner of CAYCO and SAYCO because of the repression. […] For me, [...] there was never a time where there were any tensions, you see, because in our own understanding even before the ANC Youth League was unbanned, we knew deep in our heart[s] that 9. Jeremy Seekings, Heroes or Villains ? youth politics in the 1980s , Braamfontein, Ravan Press, 1993. On the 1980s and early 1990s also see for instance Monique Marks, “Onward Marching Comrades: The Career of The Charterist Youth Movement in Diepkloof,” History Workshop, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 13-15 July 1994. (40p.). By the same author: Young Warriors. Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa , Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 2001. (xx, 171p.). 10 . Ineke van Kessel, « Beyond our wildest dreams. » The United Democratic Front and the transformation of South Africa , Charlottesville, London, University Press of Virginia, 2000. 11 . See Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003 (xviii&340p.). 4 we [were] the Youth League but we [could not] be the Youth League because of apartheid.

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