The African National Congress (ANC) and its ideological shifts over time: Attempts to define or re-define its ideological identity?

Abstract

The study investigates the ideological challenges facing the African National Congress (ANC) from being a liberation movement to it becoming the ruling party in South Africa. The study argues whether there has been an ideological evolution within the ANC or not. Furthermore, the study contends that what the ANC aspired to ideologically, as a liberation movement prior to democratisation in April 1994, is not the same as what it is confronted with as the current ruling party in South Africa. It is clear from this study that the ANC has experienced some changes from its founding principles of 1912. With a number of political changes in the South African political landscape and the changes in the challenges confronting the movement over time, the party was bound to undergo some evolutionary progress. It is argued in this study that theorising about the ideologies of liberation movements are meaningless unless the mapping out of the courses of these ideological shifts of fundamentally defining and re-defining the status of such movements over time is undertaken. Therefore, this study traces how such an evolution has happened within the ANC and what ideological impact it has had on the history of the movement.