Overview

Author Sylvia Neame’s study of the development of the national liberation movement in South Africa is in stark contrast to the frequent depictions of the history of the ANC by leading academics as fragmented, fractured and discontinuous. Not only does her analyses disprove the belief that the ANC’s development has been episodic, several of the conclusions drawn point to its essential inner coherence. Crucial to the development of the congress movement was the search for an alliance strategy that wouldensure the ANC its central role. Particularly striking, and essentially new, is the depiction of the various alliance partners - including the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Communist Party and the South African Congress of Trade Unions - and their complicated interaction. The research, based on extensive primary and secondary sources including some eighty interviews dating back to the early 1960s, uniquely combines narrative and analysis. The Congress Movement invites the reader to engage in the fascinating development of the national liberation movement in South Africa in its formative period and uncovers its outstanding continuities as well as the considerable range of its methods. Volume 1 traces the unfolding of the congress movement from 1917 and looks at socialist and other forces that played an integral part in its formation. The 1918–20 upsurge, which included an African mineworkers' strike, played a key role in this development and laid the basis in the 1920s fora partnership between the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and the African National Congress.

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9780796924865

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The Congress Movement is an historical epic, which no future scholarship in this field can ignore. Coming from within the movement it describes, this is the most authoritative history of the ANC's leadership that we are ever likely to receive. - Tom Lodge, Shedding New Light on the Historical Development of the ANC, Journal of Southern African Studies

Author Information

Sylvia Neame is a long-standing member of the Congress movement who spent several years in jail during apartheid. She has a doctorate of philosophy in the field of African history and is a former teacher and researcher at Leipzig University.

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