The Congress Movement: ICU, ANC, Cp & Congress Movement

ISBN-13: 9780796924872 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 672 str.

Sylvia Neame

Opis

This study of the development of the national liberation movement in South Africa is in stark contrast to the frequent depictions of the history of the ANC by leading academics as fragmented, fractured, and discontinuous. Not only does Sylvia Naeme s analyses disprove the belief that the ANC s development has been episodic, several of the conclusions drawn point to its essential inner coherence. Crucial to the development of the congress movement was the search for an alliance strategy that would ensure the ANC its central role. Particularly striking, and essentially new, is the depiction of the various alliance partners including the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), the Communist Party, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions and their complicated interaction. The research, based on extensive primary and secondary sources including some 80 interviews dating back to the early 1960s, uniquely combines narrative and analysis."The Congress Movement"invites the reader to engage in the fascinating development of the national liberation movement in South Africa in its formative period and uncovers its outstanding continuities as well as the considerable range of its methods. Volume 2 examines the intricate development of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union and the African National Congress in the second half of the 1920s. Various trends of reformism and radicalism affected these two organizations. This later led to the beginning of the breakup of the ICU with the secession of the Natal contingent, in part under the influence of a narrow ethnic Zulu nationalism. The breakaway also took place in the wake of an important phase in which the ICU leaders had become identified with a peasant uprising on white farms."