One of the pressing challenges of the South African political context, both as a science and lived experience, as well as a theory developing space, is the historical traditions of the ANC which have defined its story as a continuum of defining and redefining its character and purpose objectives. Whilst a plethora of scholars have written about the ANC, the default posture has mostly been narrating its history and not its traditions as a core substrate of its character. Its rich history and traditions have in fact made it a heritage site or space. Its overall contribution to liberalism in Africa, and convergence of ideologies in the ongoing construction of democraticness in the continent remains an unrecorded opportunity. This rendition, is a rejoinder, if not an enhancement of a 2017 submission on the same subject, of looking at the ANC as a heritage site, especially its conferences.
For a while, there have been strange behaviors that could easily be characterized as the subversion of the ANC's traditions and by extension its heritage as Africa's foremost institution that lives consultation and policy engagement with its members. Contemporary notions of democratic centralism in South Africa have manifested elements of cognitive elite dictatorship within a profoundly facilitative and consultation-intensive arrangement by members of the ANC on how to manage each other as a societal substrate to model an accountability ecosystem that optimizes national democracy. Understanding this tradition by South Africans will go a long way to contextualize Mamdani's assertion that 'South Africa is a (political) genocide that did not happen, as well as seeing through the many protests that could easily be classified as civil strife despite the absence of an active war.
WHAT OF ANC TRADITION
The ANC tradition connotes a set of deeply rooted, historically conditioned attitudes about the nature of the movement, the role of the ANC in society and the polity, the authentic organization and operation of the human emancipation system it represents, about the way ANCness is or should be continuously renewed, made, and applied. The ANCs tradition, which carries more its practice of being an organizational system than its inherent ideology, is one of its greatest assets within which its political and social capital is embedded. The organization's choices of cohesion, cooperation, collaboration, faction establishing, unification, confrontation, or recalibration, are significantly impacted by the existence or otherwise, as well as the nature of its tradition, or if you like heritage.
During its anti-apartheid years, when it was executing a struggle system that included several chauvinisms, its traditions have provided its members not only with strategies and tactics, but a set of mental models that were in the past used to overcome the obstacles towards emancipation of black people.
At its zenith, this tradition or ANCness carried the structures and systems of its core constituency through time, it has inserted the common interests of members into the behavior of the organization's membership and established possible futures of the movement in accordance with its policies, values, and purpose objectives. As uncertainty increases within the organization, its tradition has allowed its individual members to master the art of interpreting their environment as a learning space and an institutionalized context within which they can share, with the intent of harmonious co-existence, their reasonably convergent perspectives, ideations, ideologies, and models. It is also this tradition about its traditions that have sustained the ANC as a 'proverbial broad church' for more than a century. Notwithstanding that this tradition is to the ANC a growing liability for it to be an efficient and effective modern political party, rather than a broad church liberation movement, it possesses institutional strengths, in long haul systems terms, that are helpful in holding it together.
ABOUT THE ANC CONFERENCE AS A HERITAGE SITE
In 2017, I wrote;
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 South Africa's single 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 is a display of how far can the will of its members be respected, manipulated, and/or disregarded. This display is a layer that sediments upon others constituting 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 a convention for ANC members to almost, and in a faith-based manner, subject all doubts that they have about their organization to its conference. It is at these conferences 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 ANC's '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 prize of 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 virtual artifacts defining its heritage.
However, heritage can also be defeatist and decadent, trapping institutional vibrancy in absolute attitudes and outmoded -isms. The currency it uses to defeat a society is nostalgia and at best mythology. Because of its sacred character, it is often a difficult thing to challenge the conference heritage, albeit having flaws and weaknesses. 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 they are being uncontested publicly created a sub-culture of one-way communication its leaders have taken advantage of.
The ultimate change this pilgrimage is known to 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 define 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’s 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 concretized whilst the heritage of the Conference stayed static.
Resilient as this heritage has been, it relied on an eldership that curated it through the rugged valleys of youth imagination. In curating this heritage, elders have in most instances been the greatest obstacle for it to catch waves of modernity. Consequently, this heritage has had its optimization epochs characterized by youth rebellions that defined one significant trajectory or another. It is these generational contestations within the ANC that its heritage is based upon, and the emerging consensus is what immunizes it from subversive tendencies associated with youth immaturity and the dangers of an eldership that refuses to move on. Heritage, like tradition, derives its relevance out of features that make it a background of permanence. What heritagists and traditionalists don't seem to embrace is that embracing what modernity requires of an organization is the greatest of features in any background of permanence crafted. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzo reflecta hi policy conference
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