New comrades spur ANC's decline

The ANC's journey paints a complex picture. In 2026, the party is at a crossroads, where its founders' ideals clash with its current leadership, raising questions about its future and the integrity of its mission. By Ferial Haffajee

- Ferial Haffajee

In his majestic history of the ANC, The Founders, historian André Odendaal writes of the party founders: "The early intellectuals and activists were political innovators, responding in courageous, often contradictory ways to the challenges of their times. As one scholar has noted, 'they journeyed back and forth across vast political, cultural and personal chasms' to engineer new discourses and paths in politics...

"The actions and aspirations of the first generations, shaped by their time and place, were realistic, often insightful and forward-looking."

Odendaal chronicles the religious leaders, newspaper editors, intellectuals and landowners who came together to form the South African Native National Congress in Bloemfontein in 1912 — the forbear of the ANC.

The culture of that generation persisted through the various phases of the struggle against apartheid and into the first years of democracy, exemplified by its presidents Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe and Cyril Ramaphosa. There are younger people in this mould, but on the whole, the founders' culture is no longer dominant in the ANC.

The story of 2026 will be about the local government election, but also about whether the ANC will continue its decline, as liberation movements tend to do. Or, whether it can reverse its trajectory as it said it would when the National General Council (NGC) ended on 11 December 2025.

Laced through the party's "base document" to inform its agenda at the NGC is a lament on the quality of its leadership and membership, and the distance between the rich cadreship the ANC was able to nurture for most of its history, until things soon turned after 1994.