AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS

(ANC), originally (until 1923) South African Native National Congress, South African political party and black nationalist organization. The ANC was long dedicated to the elimination of apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination. It was banned by the white South African government from 1960 to 1990, during which time it operated underground and outside South African territory. The ANC was subsequently legalized, and its president, Nelson Mandela, became president in South Africa's first multiracial government in 1994. The oldest political body in South Africa, it was founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, its main goal being the maintenance of voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and blacks in the Cape Province. It was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. In the late 1920s the ANC's leaders split over whether to cooperate with the Communist Party, and the ensuing victory of the conservatives left the party small and disorganized through the 1930s. In the 1940s the ANC revived under younger leaders who pressed for a more militant stance against colour bars in South Africa. The ANC Youth League, founded in 1944, attracted such figures as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Mandela, who in turn displaced the party's moderate leadership in 1949. Under their leadership the ANC began sponsoring nonviolent protests, strikes, boycotts, and marches, in the process becoming a target of police harassment and arrest. By the end of World War II the ANC had begun strong agitation against the pass laws; and, after the victory (1948) of the National Party with its doctrines of apartheid and white supremacy, the ANC's membership grew rapidly, rising to 100,000 in 1952, the year that Albert Luthuli was elected to head the party. In 1960 the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an ANC split-off, organized massive demonstrations against the pass laws. After police shot hundreds of unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville, both the ANC and PAC were outlawed. Thus denied legal avenues for political change, the ANC turned first to sabotage and then began to organize abroad for guerrilla warfare. In 1961 the ANC announced formation of an armed force known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), which, with Mandela as its head, would carry out acts of sabotage as part of its campaign against apartheid. Mandela and other Umkhonto leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment by the government in 1964. Many younger blacks joined the ANC after the Soweto uprising in 1976, when the police and army killed more than 600 people. The ANC's campaign of guerrilla warfare was basically ineffective, owing to stringent South African internal-security measures. In 1990 the government lifted its ban on the ANC, whose leaders were allowed to return to South Africa and conduct peaceful political activities. In return, the ANC suspended its guerrilla struggle against the government. The most important ANC leader in the 1990s was Nelson Mandela (q.v.), who succeeded Tambo as president in 1991. Mandela led the ANC in negotiations (199293) with the government over the transition to an elected government based on universal suffrage. The ANC's opposition to apartheid had won it the allegiance of most black South Africans, and in April 1994 the party swept the country's first all-race elections, winning more than 60 percent of the vote for seats in the new National Assembly. Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's first black president on May 10, 1994, heading a government of national unity.