The th!nc Foundation

The ANC was formed in 1912 as both a response to the exclusionary nature of the 1909 Convention that defined the borders of present day South Africa, and the rise of nationalism in Southern Africa. The founding fathers of the ANC sought to create a vehicle with which they would articulate both the aspirations and discontent of the African masses for their exclusion in an essentially whites only state and government. The seeds of a nationalist project for the South African State were thus set, and incidentally crowned by the formation of a parallel whites only nationalist movement that was to conduct its narrow race based nationalist ‘struggle’ against British Colonialism through electoral politics; the National Party. The exclusion of the ANC in the space of electoral politics became a key ingredient amongst a myriad to define the character of the ANC as we experience today. In its early days the ANC sought to make known its ‘demands’, and sometimes ‘requests’ for self-determination a...