What should we do to push the country to the left?

[struggle4progress]

35. The ANC, oldest and largest of the anti-apartheid organizations, was founded in the era

Last edited Mon Mar 25, 2013, 03:06 PM - Edit history (1)

when Gandhi was in South Africa: the ANC maintained relations with the Indian Congress associated with Gandhi, and IIRC its charter was modeled in part on that of the NAACP in the US. The movement as a whole became larger and more complicated after the 1950s: it had an international component; it had sympathizers among English liberals in South Africa, who had some parliamentary representation unavailable to the majority population; it had a military wing; it increasingly worked with various other black opposition groups (some of whom had rather different ideological stances) to craft a united front; and so on

I'm not suggesting that various individuals were unimportant, and in fact many people were important in one way or another. Mandela once said: “No white person has done more for South Africa than Trevor Huddleston.” Tutu was able to use his church position to advantage, in order to emphasize certain moral claims and to persuade the international community of the justice of an economic boycott, just as Helen Suzman was able to use her parliamentary position to advantage, in order to obtain otherwise unavailable data regarding certain government operations. But for many years, almost everyone who became prominent as a spokesman or organizer ended up "banned" or jailed or dead. The movement therefore could not progress without developing widespread popular agreement about how to interpret events and how to respond to events and how to move forward, independent of current "leaders"