South Africa’s Radicals: The Anti-Apartheid Movement’s Forgotten Wing

Abstract

South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement has tended to be narrated as a monolith, but in practice, this has allowed one wing of the struggle–the African National Congress (ANC)–to stand in for the entire thing. In this piece, we recover the politics of an alternative tendency, which we term South Africa’s radical tradition. Against the ANC’s strategy of a two-stage revolution–first to a racially inclusive democracy, second to socialism–South Africa’s radicals insisted that “stages” missed the point: these twin struggles were inseparable. We conclude by drawing lessons for activists fighting racial capitalism today, both in South Africa and around the globe.