Heritage is an embodiment of a
past we wish to take into our future without losing the benefits of a changing
present. It defines not only a sense of belonging, it makes the past a form of
the present and an abstraction of what a future will look like with us as a
presence of the past which is a present we are living in now. Like its adjunct
tradition, it creates and reorders our background of permanence. It assists us
to transmit the merits of the past to modern-day originality. Such a background anchors the values with
which a society can be normed.
The ANC conference, as the single
most event that makes it possible for society to ‘rethink the dispersion of history
in the form of the same’, is in itself a heritage site not only for its members
but observers of how a democratic process unfolds. It will be displaying how
far can the will of its members be respected and/or manipulated as well as
disregarded. This display will unfortunately add a layer that sediments upon
existing ones constituting that heritage. A heritage that has enabled members
to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for its original values.
The Heritage character of the
conference is one element of ANCness that has made it go through most of its challenges
over the years. It has in fact become convention for ANC members to almost and
in a faith-based manner subject all doubts that they have about their
organisation to its conference. The conference is a meeting where the ANC
congregates every five years to find itself, refine its strategic pathways,
define new policy trajectories, reconfirm its strategy and tactics and elect
from amongst its members in good standing new leadership. Treated like a
pilgrimage for its polyvalent ideologues to create a consensus without a gluing
ideology, the conference has become mythical and somewhat ‘spiritualized’.
Mirroring its origination
conference in 1912, the conference invites into the ‘sacred’ space,
euphemistically called the festival of ideas, various sectors of society to
enrich its continuum of ‘prayers’ for and about the future. These prayers,
unlike their religious equivalents, are expected to be guides on how to develop
policies in the state it aspires to always rule, the ultimate price for
successful ANCness. In a multi-party democratic context of South Africa, where
the ontological position of the ANC is under constant review by a society that
wants to claim portions of its glorious history of fighting all forms of
chauvinisms, with racism as its apex of enemies, its conferences have become a
form of privileged shelter for the sovereignty of its consciousness as a
liberation movement.
As a conglomerate of political
orientations on how best South Africa can be governed, its heritage includes
being accorded the status of leader of society. Whilst this status
accentuates/ed one of its prayer items, it, and for some time, earned it
through conduct and the leadership it produced. The various conditions and
epochs it went through became its capacity building process. It did not only
become a leading institution but itself an institution of leadership. Members
would, and to a degree still, have their steps being ordered by internal
practices that have grown into its virtual artefacts defining its heritage.
However, heritage can also be
defeatist and decadent, trapping us in absolute attitudes and outmoded
nationalisms. The currency it uses to defeat a society is nostalgia, and at
best mythology. Because of its character of the sacred, it is often a difficult
thing to challenge the conference heritage, albeit having flaws and weaknesses,
in a democratic sense of its facile meaning, . This risk of heritage seems to
have engulfed the ANC conferencing process. The quality of leadership and
prayer items proposed at its five yearly pilgrimage gathering, the conference, is
of such a quality that them being uncontested publicly created a sub-culture of
one way communication later leaders took advantage of.
The ultimate change this
pilgrimage is known have been consistent about is that of leadership change. As
part of the conferencing heritage the process of selecting such has been
anchored in branches. Being a historically elite and middle class formation, the
assumption of a class nuanced character of society became the assurance for the
quality of individuals sent to contest. The deferral of the enfranchising dream
by various non-black regimes called for new methods of petitioning powers that
be on the demands of society. These new methods also defines heroism in the ANC
and thus opened avenues for new standards for meritorious leadership. These
standards grew within the process leading up to the conference as a heritage
and yet did not change it.
Assumptions of quality would
therefore be nuanced outside the traditional modes of social class and criteria
changed outside what the ‘historical dominant middle class’ had hermetically
sealed themselves into. This heritage also occurred in conditions of illegality
whose variable influence churned an unconscious pecking order not traditional
to the ANC’ historical self. Merit as it is known in the heritage changed and
the template of being ANC got altered. Out of the template a new breed of merit
concretize whilst the heritage of Conference stayed static.
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