The ANC's 100 Years: More Recent Work on its History

Résumé 0

Last year was the centenary of the ANC; next year will mark twenty years since it came into office as the majority party in the Government of National Unity. Today much criticism of the ANC in government explains its failures by referring to its retention of an identity as a "liberation movement" and its inability to shed its struggle mindset. This makes it all the more important to know what the ANC did in the struggle and how attitudes dating from that struggle may still be current, such as the belief in the rightness of the cause, which usually means condemning those who did not work with it in the struggle, and in the responsibility of the "movement" to continue to exercise power, in order to pursue the goals of the struggle. This article considers three important contributions to the history of the ANC that appeared in the centenary years and places them in the context of other recent writing on the ANC.