Les Cahiers de l’IFAS #10: The A.N.C. Youth League

or the Invention of a South African Youth Political Organisation.

The African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) is the youth political organisation of the ANC. It was (re)invented in 1990, when the liberation movement resettled in South Africa after being unbanned. The organisation was re-launched on the basis of the South African Youth Congress (SAYCO), a group that embodied the uprising of the South African youth against apartheid during the 1980s. The ANCYL inherited its name from a previous organisation, founded in 1944 by the generation of Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo who had taken it upon themselves to transform the strategies of the ANC. This led to the banishment of the ANC in 1960, and to its transformation into a liberation movement using armed struggle against the apartheid regime. Defining the very nature of the ANC as a political organisation raises a series of issues, as it seems that its present identity still differs from that of a “conventional” political party.

The re-launch of the ANCYL was based on a dual legacy, which was to become the root of conflicts with its parent organisation following a dialectics of autonomy and independence. When it merged with the ANCYL, SAYCO let an important part of its independence go and the new organisation remained to be built up. The second part of the 1990s was then characterised by a willing transformation into a mass-based youth organisation. At the same time, the ANCYL’s relationship with the ANC moved towards subordination. Nevertheless, its identity remains unstable and is still for a source of internal struggles. The encounter between two generations of political activism, that of the 1980s and that of the youth who became politically aware while apartheid was collapsing, deepens these engagements. Ten years after the fall of white minority rule, the organisational transition of the ANCYL still needs to be achieved. The next National Congress of the ANC and that of the ANCYL, which are to be held in 2007 and 2008, might prove decisive in the accomplishment of such transformations.

The ANCYL still intends to play a major role in the election of the ANC’s leadership and it seems that its influence proved important in the previous congresses. The rise of the Young Communists’ League (YCL), the South African Communist Party (SACP)’s youth wing, shows that the left wing of the ANC is planning to become mass-based and wants to propose an alternative to the present orientations of the organisation.

 

Raphaël Botiveau, 2007, The A.N.C. Youth League or the Invention of a South African Youth Political Organisation, Johannesburg, IFAS, Les Cahiers de l’IFAS N°10.

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