The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa

Abstract

[...]in Part Four, Odendaal shows how African leaders forged, between 1902 and 1912, a national democratic political platform in the South African Native National Congress. There is, for example, only a brief treatment of the relations among the Natal African Christian leaders and the Zulu royal family that led, on the one hand, to the emergence of Inkatha while allowing, on the other hand, for the majority of isiZulu speakers to embrace the ANC.

The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa. By André Odendaal. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp xv, 569. $40.00.

André Odendaal's weighty tome, The Founders, is a lavishly detailed history and tribute to the men and women who laid the foundations for African democratic political participation in South Africa. It is an important addition to a steadily growing body of works about the African National Congress (ANC) that has emerged since blacks won the rights to full democracy in 1994 as well as to the pre-1994 studies of the party and broader black opposition politics. As such, it follows a familiar tone in affirming, if not celebrating, the ANC's achievements in a somewhat uncritical fashion. Given that we are twenty years on from the end of apartheid, and that recently leading members of the party have faced recent criticism, it remains to be seen if future histories of the ANC depart from the approach taken in The Founders.

Odendaal brings considerable insight to this study. He first paved the way for this analysis in his seminal work, Vukani Bantu1 The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (David Philip, 1984), and he has played a leading role in academic and sporting opposition to apartheid for most of his life. The Founders is as comprehensive as it is passionate. His writing enriches our understanding of the ideals and efforts of a wide range of pioneering Africans who sought to cultivate democracy despite the vicissitudes of the white regime. If read in conjunction with other works, especially Paul Landau's important Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Tom Lodge's Black Politics in South Africa (Longman, 1983), we can begin to see a much more thorough and nuanced picture of African initiatives for the political transformation of the region. Odendaal situates the foundations of African democracy in a significantly earlier period than other studies of the ANC such as Saul Dubow's The African National Congress (Sutton, 2000) and Francis Meli's South Africa Belongs to Us: A History of the ANC (Indiana University Press, 1989). The Founders also differs from Peter Limb's important study, The ANC's Early Years (UNISA, 2010), in that Odendaal emphasizes personalities as compared to Limb's greater focus on organizational structures.

The book spans fifty comparatively brief chapters-most are ten to twelve pages- beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending in 1912 with the formation of the formal political organization of the ANC. Odendaal opens in Part One by setting the context in which Africans first came to terms with the colonial order and then analyzes how they applied what they learned for their own political empowerment. A key element of this process was, of course, the Christian "civilizing mission" and its attendant features of literacy. He then shows how deftly African leaders transformed this process from a regional effort in the Eastern Cape into a national political organization and activism. In Part Two, Odendaal explains how the "Congress" movement spread and won over supporters, including women, across the country. Part Three examines the rapid growth of African political engagement following the South African War of 1899-1902. Odendaal sees this as a response to the failure of British imperialists to forge an alliance with democratic Africans as they had with the vanquished Afrikaners. Finally, in Part Four, Odendaal shows how African leaders forged, between 1902 and 1912, a national democratic political platform in the South African Native National Congress. The consistent and cogently argued main point of the story is that, overall, the influence of western-educated elites, "school people," was the strongest line of continuity in leadership for the ANC.

The title itself is suggestive of the ANC as the sole progenitor of South African democracy, and one wonders if it was intended as a riposte to Robert Rotberg's similarly titled biography of Cecil Rhodes, The Founder (Oxford University Press, 1988). In this vein, Odendaal may be offering something of a corrective to earlier imperial histories, which emphasized colonial processes as opposed to African agency in the forging of democratic opposition to apartheid. If Odendaal leaves a small lacuna in his coverage it is perhaps in terms of the important developments in rural Natal and Zululand. There is, for example, only a brief treatment of the relations among the Natal African Christian leaders and the Zulu royal family that led, on the one hand, to the emergence of Inkatha while allowing, on the other hand, for the majority of isiZulu speakers to embrace the ANC. Nevertheless, overall, Odendaal has provided a landmark work in The Founders', one that truly captures the sophistication and dynamism of African political leadership.