In 1946 Lembede stated that co-operation among Africans, Indians and coloureds ‘can only take place between Africans as a single unit and other Non-European groups as separate units’70 – multiracialism, in other words. The League endorsed the 1947 Pact, stating in its ‘Basic Policy’ that ‘… the National Organisations of the Africans, Indians and Coloureds may co-operate on common issues’.71
The Communist Party had endorsed a similar position in 1943, calling for separate organisations representing Africans, Indians and coloureds, co-ordinated at regional and national levels.72 With the rise of the Youth League and the growing influence of its nationalist programme, however, the CPSA came to support the idea of one mass organisation with which it would co-operate and, at the end of the decade, in its 1950 Central Committee Report, it called for the transformation of the existing separate national organisations:
… into a revolutionary party of workers, peasants, intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie, linked together in a firm organisation … guided by a definite programme of struggle against all forms of racial discrimination in alliance with the class-conscious European workers and intellectuals.73
Organisational non-racialism, in other words; and with special room for white left-wing intellectuals.
The language of the report was imprecise and unclear. For the Youth League, however, it implied the creation of a non-racial organisation, pursuing class struggle, with, in effect, strong influence exerted by white communists – and this immediately cemented the League’s rejection of the CPSA approach to the integration of structures. This mix of issues meant that the question of racial co-operation – that is, the form racial co-operation should take – was a key issue of contention between the two organisations.
The conflict spilled into the open in relation to participation in the 1948 People’s Assembly for Votes for All, when the Transvaal branches of the ANC, CPSA, APO and TIC proposed calling a non-racial assembly to highlight the franchise issue on the eve of the (white) general election. The assembly soon became caught up in the ANCYL–CPSA conflict, with youth leaguers on the ANC’s Transvaal Executive declaring themselves willing to participate in the assembly only if the organising committee was restricted to representatives of the ANC, TIC and APO – in other words, accepting cooperation between national organisations, but not with the CPSA.
Youth League agitation ensured that the ANC refused to participate officially in the assembly. Transvaal ANC President C S Ramohanoe later faced a motion of no confidence for issuing a statement in support of the assembly.74 The point at issue was not mere anti-communism, argued law student Nelson Mandela of the Transvaal ANC Executive (and a leading Youth League member) in The Guardian, but that
… the working committee of the People’s Assembly had invited the African National Congress to send delegates to the Assembly. The A. N. C. Executive was not in opposition to the general aims of the People’s Assembly, but felt that it was being summoned in an incorrect manner, in that the established national organisations were being by-passed … The organisers of the People’s Assembly had departed from … agreed methods and there were suspicions that a permanent ‘unity movement’ was being formed.75
The clash in 1948 between the ANCYL and the CPSA is illustrative in two respects. The dispute over the assembly highlighted the way in which ideological differences were being fought out over the issue of non-racialism – not simply on the basis of Youth League racism or exclusivity, as conventional wisdom has it, but because moves towards non-racialism were seen to be part of an ideology which stressed class above race, and would retard the emergence of a strong African National(ist) Congress. (It is not disputed that the League included anti-white and anti-communist elements.)
Secondly, the dispute reflected the growing influence of the ANCYL within the ANC. The League had initially set itself a three- to five-year programme to change Congress,76 but in the next four years it made few moves towards developing a mass base or radicalising its methods of opposition. The political space was occupied by others – the squatter movement was being organised by Mpanza into the Sofasonke Party, which contested Advisory Board elections; the ADP gained representation on the Native Representative Council with the election of Paul Mosaka; and the CPSA extended its township base. Sensing the need for action and the competition it faced, the League adopted a more assertive tone in 1948:
From the very outset, the Congress Youth League set itself, inter alia, the historic task of imparting dynamic substance and matter to the organisational form of the A.N.C. This took the form of a forthright exposition of the National Liberatory outlook – African Nationalism – which the Youth League seeks to impose on the Mother Body.77
In a private letter written in 1948 Mda acknowledged that a clash between the ANC and the Youth League was ‘inevitable’ because ‘… the Congress Senior leadership reflects the dying order of pseudo-liberalism and conservatism, of appeasement and compromises’.78
The rise of the Youth League
In order to implement its programme successfully the League had to transform the ANC, and to do so it had to be in a position from which it could determine Congress policy. It also had to squeeze out any other organisation or group seeking to do the same thing. In the first instance this entailed building up its own ranks, and branches were established in Durban, Cape Town and at Fort Hare, although the majority of youth leaguers remained in the Transvaal. League members also began to move into ANC provincial structures.
It was also necessary to counter competing ideologies that sought to influence the development of the ANC – including those of (white) liberals and (white) communists. As stated above the League turned on white liberals such as the Ballingers, Edgar Brookes and members of the Institute of Race Relations who had influence over some leading Congress personalities. Hostility towards the liberals was exacerbated by disputes in 1946 over the adjournment of the Native Representative Council (NRC) and the League’s call for the boycott of all ‘Native Representation’ elections. The process of weaning Congress from the influence of white liberals was largely completed by 1947.
Finally, if the Youth League were to direct a militant movement for national liberation under the aegis of the ANC, competing organisations (as well as ideologies) had to be isolated. The AAC remained a small organisation, primarily based in the Eastern Cape and increasingly dominated by the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) to which it had affiliated, while the ADP had begun to collapse by 1947. Both were accused of causing ‘rift[s] in the national unity front at this critical moment’ with the effect of ‘invit[ing] more oppression for Africans’.79 Put simply, anyone who sought to mobilise Africans was attacked, including the CPSA, which had largely set the pace in township organisation in the 1940s, and which proposed to ‘draw in thousands of members of each racial and national group, provide them with a Socialist education, and organise them for work among their own people …’.80
Paradoxically, however, as the power and influence of the ANCYL grew within the ANC in the late 1940s, older ANC leaders revealed a willingness to work with communists. The League failed in its attempts in 1945 and 1947 to have all CPSA members removed from Congress, with communists and the older ANC leaders jointly outvoting its call for a boycott of all elections.81 Nonetheless, youth leaguers occupied increasingly important positions within the provincial structures of the ANC and, by 1948, were sufficiently entrenched to prevent the organisation from participating in the People’s Assembly.
By 1949 the League was powerful enough to insist that any candidate for the post of President-General of the ANC must endorse the Programme of Action. At the annual conference of the ANC in 1949 the League succeeded in ousting Xuma from the post and securing the election of Dr James Moroka, while ANCYL members including Ashby Mda, V V T Mbobo, Dr J L Z Njongwe, Godfrey Pitje, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were elected to the National Executive Committee (with Sisulu in the important post of Secretary-General). Two years later youth leaguers were able to remove A W G Champion as President of