The ANC Youth League. Clive Glaser
through several widely read African-run newspapers. The key national and regional leaders, such as Seme himself, were busy professionals or businessmen who were as interested in their own livelihoods as in politics. Though the ANC claimed to be a kind of parliament for all African people, it had in reality subsided into a part-time, out-of-touch, uncoordinated shell of an organisation.
In 1936 the government passed legislation to remove the limited African male franchise that survived in the Cape. In its place a Natives’ Representative Council (NRC) was established: it would include 12 elected and 4 nominated African representatives, and act as a statutory advisory body with no executive or legislative authority. This outraged African leaders not only across the country, but especially in the Cape, where many were themselves qualified voters and the franchise was regarded as an important lasting vestige of Cape liberalism. Some, most vociferously a group of Western Cape Trotskyites, called for a boycott of the NRC. Nevertheless, the ANC, while opposing the legislation, encouraged its members to stand for the new body, which, it argued, provided useful political resources and maintained a valuable line of communication with the South African state.
The election of Alfred Xuma to the presidency of the ANC in 1940 represented an important turning point in the life of the movement. At 47, he was relatively youthful to assume leadership, and he immediately signalled his intention to make sweeping changes. Xuma was an impressive man. A well-educated Christian liberal, he was in many ways typical of the ANC leadership of the time. He had trained as a medical doctor and spent many years in the United States. He married a black American and returned to South Africa to run a successful medical practice in Sophiatown, west of Johannesburg. A degree in law or medicine was almost a prerequisite for top ANC leadership in those days, and the highly status-conscious ANC membership was impressed by his education and erudition. Many were a little in awe of him. He was clearly a member of the elite, which never related comfortably to the uneducated masses.
Xuma was determined to transform the ramshackle Congress. Within a couple of years he had simplified the constitution to make it more workable. This included removing the ‘upper house’ of chiefs (which was inactive and contributed little), giving women full status and formalising branch structures. Most importantly, he professionalised the entire organisation. Membership fees were made compulsory, thus bringing in regular income and allowing for the appointment of a few full-time administrators. Finances were properly audited. Meetings had to be formally constituted and minuted. To overcome the problem of inter-conference continuity and leadership, Xuma established a Johannesburg-based working committee whose members had to live within a 50-mile radius of Johannesburg. Significantly, this shifted the centre of power to the Witwatersrand. Xuma was unapologetic about this. If the organisation was going to run efficiently, it was necessary to have a core group that met regularly and could handle day-to-day business.
Xuma was eager to explore all options that might broaden the appeal, expand the membership and solidify the finances of the ANC. It followed that he was pragmatic when it came to cooperation with leftists and non-Africans. This, as I shall show later, is crucial in understanding the rise of the Youth League. Although he was himself a traditional liberal, Xuma always argued that the ANC should be a broad umbrella body for all Africans irrespective of their political leanings. The Communist Party was extremely active for most of the 1940s and, under the leadership of Moses Kotane, its African membership grew substantially. Xuma recognised the dedication, courage and energy of communist activists, as well as their common interest in fighting for African political rights. In the face of criticism both from within the ANC and without, he welcomed African communists into the ANC. Kotane himself and several other prominent African communists served on the executive of the ANC under Xuma. Equally controversial for many in the ANC was Xuma’s willingness to work with the South African Indian Congress. Influenced by Gandhian tactics, the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses (NIC and TIC) had stepped up their battle for political and economic rights in the 1940s and were eager to establish a cooperative relationship with the ANC. Xuma welcomed this; in March 1947 he signed the famous ‘Doctors’ Pact’ with Dr Yusuf Dadoo and Dr Monty Naicker. Here, again, he recognised the usefulness of a political alliance, not to mention the generous donations made to the ANC by Indian merchants linked to the Indian Congresses.
Aside from developments within the ANC itself, the rise of the Youth League needs to be seen in the context of broader political and economic developments in South Africa in the late 1930s and 1940s. These were years of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. By the late 1930s secondary industry, which generally encouraged a more permanent form of urbanisation, had overtaken mining as a contributor to GDP. This led to South Africa’s first major phase of mass African urbanisation – what one newspaper at the time dubbed ‘the Second Great Trek’. By the end of World War II,
the big cities were no longer zones of white majority: they had become African cities. Municipalities struggled to provide services to the newly urbanising masses and, not surprisingly, this sparked urgent subsistence struggles over housing, transport, wages and informal trade. While the Communist Party immersed itself in these battles, the ANC leadership was much more cautious: it generally viewed the state, at least until the National Party election victory in 1948, as something that could be persuaded rather than resisted. This attitude was encouraged by the fact that Jan Smuts had become prime minister again in 1939 after a controversy over participation in the war. During a period of ‘war liberalism’ the Smuts government promised, and in some cases delivered, real reform on issues such as pass laws, property rights and the skills colour bar. Smuts was an enthusiastic signatory to the idealistic Atlantic Charter of 1941, which promised national self-determination and equal rights to all people. Smuts’s reforms were driven in part by a need to encourage war unity, in part by a desire to modernise South Africa and come more into line with the western world.
Immediately after the war, as the white electorate became more alarmed by African urbanisation, and as the opposition Nationalists offered increasingly aggressive responses to white fears, the Smuts government backtracked rapidly. Nevertheless, Smuts’s reformism had raised hope for many of the older members of the ANC. Although the government showed no signs of giving up real power, maintaining its stance of paternalist ‘trusteeship’ towards the black majority, they felt that it was worth working strategically within state-subsidised advisory structures, such as township Advisory Boards and the new NRC, to encourage reform. Many disagreed and, as I shall show shortly, the debate around participation was significant for the emerging Youth League.
The growing cities of the time attracted not only African workers, but a class of educated African professionals. Dozens converged especially on Johannesburg in the late 1930s and early 1940s looking for work, mostly as teachers. A few were able to qualify as lawyers and doctors. (Until the 1930s Africans had to do medical training overseas, although a small number were admitted to Wits University in the 1940s.) Almost all of them trained, or did a part of their training, at a handful of mission schools and colleges. Most famous was the triangle of institutions in the Eastern Cape: Healdtown, Lovedale and Fort Hare. The former two offered secondary schooling and teacher training, while Fort Hare College, in Alice, was at the time the only university (a status officially acquired in the 1960s) for Africans in the subcontinent. Adams College, a high school, industrial school and teacher training college in rural Natal, and St Peter’s, an Anglican secondary school in the south of Johannesburg, were also significant. These colleges drew together the elite of African youth (mostly from Christian backgrounds) from various corners of the country. Once qualified, they tended to gravitate to the bigger towns and cities because professional work was scarce in their home regions. A small number of women, who mostly went on to become teachers, passed through these colleges as well. On the whole, professional opportunities were very restricted for women. Those who had professional aspirations were generally directed into nursing. A good number of these nurses and women teachers also migrated to the cities in search of work.
The townships of Johannesburg became an extraordinary melting pot of young educated Africans, many of whom had already become acquainted with one another during their school and college years. They mixed socially and often shared ideas. Some were in the process of studying further. Two of these young men, A.P. Mda and Anton Lembede, were the outstanding inspirational figures in the Congress Youth League. Others in their Johannesburg milieu included later iconic figures such as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo