The ANC Youth League. Clive Glaser
Edgar, who have written the most detailed and subtle accounts of the early ANCYL, note that Mda is a hugely under-recognised figure in the history of African nationalism in South Africa. Joe Matthews, a prominent Youth League member in the early 1950s, for example, acknowledged that Mda was ‘probably the chief architect’ of the ANCYL.1Ashby Peter Mda was born in April 1916 in the Herschel district of the Eastern Cape. He came from a relatively educated and privileged background: his father, one of a small number of Africans on the Cape voters’ roll, was a local farmer and headman, and his mother was a teacher – very unusual for an African woman in the 1920s and 1930s. His parents, though Anglican, sent him to nearby Catholic primary and secondary schools. He then trained as a teacher but struggled to find work in his home region and, like so many of his generation, headed for the Witwatersrand in 1937. Even on the Rand he did not find work as a teacher immediately. For the first year or so, he was forced to do menial domestic work and then found a job as a labourer in a foundry. Educated Africans were precariously positioned in the middle class. White society offered them little respect for their education and the limited white-collar jobs available to them were not much more lucrative than unskilled labour. This was often a great source of resentment. Eventually Mda was offered a post in a Catholic school in Germiston in 1938, before being transferred to a primary school in Orlando.
While working in Johannesburg he was trans-formed, Edgar notes, from a fairly conventional ‘Cape African liberal’ to a ‘militant African nationalist’.2He had been an enthusiastic supporter of the All African Convention (AAC) in its formative years in the mid-1930s, seeing the protection of the Cape African franchise as a crucial rallying point. But in Johannesburg he encountered a more radical, less parochial politics and became disillusioned with the narrowness of the AAC. He joined reading clubs initiated by communists and engaged in endless conversations with his peers. He became an enthusiastic member of the ANC in 1940 and supported Xuma’s attempts to revitalise the party. He was also politicised by his involvement in teachers’ politics. As president of the Catholic African Teachers’ Union and chair of the Pimville branch of the Transvaal African Teachers’ Association (TATA), Mda was a central figure in a teachers’ wage campaign in 1940. Although TATA was a very cautious organisation, as its members were largely dependent on state employment, it took up the wage issue energetically, advertising the almost undignified poverty in which African teachers had to live. TATA was pulled along by younger teachers such as Mda and another future Youth League founder, David Bopape. After ongoing negotiations with the government, and only minor wage improvements, an impressive teachers’ march brought several thousand demonstrators into downtown Johannesburg in May 1944. Mda was in the thick of it.
By the early 1940s Mda had become an avowed African nationalist. He rejected all vestiges of Smuts’s trusteeship and segregation. Africans, he insisted, should be politically self-reliant and he called on the ANC to stop cooperating with Indians and communists, who, he argued, were trying to advance their own agendas. Catholicism had left a powerful imprint on Mda and he rejected communism at least in part because of its atheism. But, more significantly, he insisted that the Communist Party was dominated by whites who did not really have African interests at heart. Nevertheless, he also saw western capitalism as greedy, heartless and individualistic, and supported a more egalitarian social model. While he was scornful of the mostly coloured Trotskyites in the AAC, he found their boycott argument compelling. It was time, he felt, for Africans to stop cooperating with all government institutions and challenge white power more directly. His ideas resonated with a number of young educated men in Johannesburg who were frustrated with the slow pace of change, with the caution of the ANC leadership, and with the indignities of segregation. One important example was Anton Lembede, who became a close friend and housemate in 1943.
Lembede was born into a large, poor family in rural Natal in 1914. His father was a farm labourer, but his mother had achieved a Standard 5 education and was able to find work as a school teacher in surrounding small towns during Anton’s childhood. Around 1927 his mother, who home-taught Anton and valued education, convinced her husband to move the family to a reserve area between Pietermaritzburg and Durban where there were better educational possibilities. The family converted to Catholicism at about this time and the church became an important part of Anton’s upbringing. The local Catholic clergy recognised his talents and encouraged him to go to school, where he excelled. After completing his Standard 6 he was awarded a scholarship to Adams College to train for a teacher’s certificate. In spite of his humble background, he quickly made an impression as an exceptionally intelligent, dedicated scholar. He had a particular gift for languages. After leaving Adams in 1936, he found work as a teacher in several Natal and Free State towns until 1943. During these years his thirst for education continued. After completing his matriculation in 1937, he enrolled as a correspondence student at Unisa for a Bachelor’s degree, which he completed with philosophy and Roman law majors in 1940. He followed this up with a law degree through Unisa and qualified in 1942. This was a rare achievement for an African in the 1940s. Only a tiny elite managed to progress beyond teaching to more prestigious professions. Not satisfied with his educational achievements, he enrolled for a Master’s degree in theology in 1943. In that same year he moved to Johannesburg to do his articles with the ANC elder statesman Pixley Seme. Seme, who had largely withdrawn from ANC politics after losing the presidency in 1937, ran one of the very few African law practices in Johannesburg. Lembede later became a full partner in 1946. Through Seme, Lembede was quickly introduced into ANC circles in Johannesburg.
Lembede and Mda, who had previously met in the late 1930s, struck up a close friendship. Apart from being mission-educated and politically passionate, they had in common a strong Catholic influence. Though well qualified, neither earned very much in 1943 and it was convenient for them to share accommodation. They spent many long hours sparring intellectually and, together, shaped the ideology that would underpin the ANCYL. While Mda was a born politician, Lembede was more of a philosopher.
It was Lembede who invented the term ‘Africanism’ to describe his brand of nationalism. Like Mda, he was suspicious of alliances with non-Africans and emphasised self-reliance. Africans, he felt passionately, should overcome their sense of inferiority, draw on the rich cultural traditions of Africa and take pride in their identity, an identity rooted in the ‘soil’ of Africa. They should unite to overcome white (which he saw as foreign) domination. African nationalism, as an ideal, was a unique mobilising vehicle because it had ‘magnetic pull’. Africans needed to draw on an inner strength, to develop their own resources, confidence and economic independence. Though by the 1940s he had rejected the conservatism of his schoolboy role model, Booker T. Washington, Lembede retained an attraction to Washington’s doctrine of self-help and economic ‘upliftment’. Like Mda, Lembede loathed communism but rejected western capitalism. He idealised a style of ‘indigenous’ African humanism, or ubuntu, which prioritised community responsibility over individual interest. While Mda could be more politically pragmatic, Lembede’s nationalism was more dogmatic. His obsession with race, discipline and unity even led to a brief admiration for fascism. Though denouncing Nazism, he admired the Hitler youth for their ‘worship’ of ‘an ideal’ and their group unity. Mda, in their many private exchanges, probably helped to tone down Lembede’s purism.
Lembede and Mda were only two of the many young African professionals talking passionately about politics in the late 1930s and 1940s. The Transvaal African Students’ Association, for example, held lively discussions in Johannesburg. At Fort Hare, a Social Studies Society focused on contemporary political issues; several later Youth League founders attended these talks. In Natal, Jordan Ngubane, a journalist and classmate of Lembede’s at Adams College, helped set up a short-lived National Union of African Youth in Natal. TATA, politicised by the wage issue, also provided a forum for discussion. None of these groups was affiliated to the ANC, but they were eventually to impact on ANC politics.
By 1943 these men, mostly in their mid- to late twenties, were looking for ways to influence the frustratingly staid ANC from within. As Congress Mbata later recalled: ‘Almost every resolution of the ANC had started like this: We pray the Minister, We request the government, We humbly request … and so on. It was this sort of thing that made the younger people feel … that something more dynamic and much more direct was needed.’3