Pixley Seme, founder of the ANC, was born on this day in 1881

Please read the [linked article](https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/issue/winter-2020%E2%80%9321/article/extraordinary-life-pixley-seme-cc-1906).

There are two critiques of the ANC you usually find online.

The first is the “Since Mandela” critique. This comes from someone who knows the history of the ANC only vaguely. They know that Mandela was this amazing peacemaker but that since he left office, corruption took rot as did policies of rhetoric and policies around racial redress (which they view as stemming from resentment or being “stuck in the past”, c.f. “identity politics”).

The second critique comes from people who know a bit more about ANC history. Deeper in the comment threads, you will find people pointing out that, ackshually, Mandela wasn’t a pacifist like King or Gandhi – he started MK, the armed wing of the ANC. They will point out that MK sometimes took actions which killed people. They will highlight the closeness of the ANC to regimes like the USSR and Cuba. Their critique is that it wasn’t just “since Mandela”, but rather that the ANC is a fundamentally radical, left wing, “anti-imperialist, anti-Western” type of party.

These critiques often (but not always) go together with an underlying motive to delegitimise the anti-Apartheid struggle or engage in Apartheid denialism. In the worst case scenario, people will argue that Mandela and the ANC really were violent, revolutionary communists and racial supremacists and that that is the real reason why Apartheid kind of had to happen (I have seen this argument being made). In South Africa, this argument is known as the Swartgevaar (Black Danger). It says that what happened in 20th century South Africa was a somewhat understandable attempt to protect White South Africans from Black South African racial and communist extremism, but that it was taken too far.

A softer version of this argument is when people bemoan the fact that the ANC is not a Seretse Khama-like party. Why do Black South Africans, the complaint goes, have to be so anti-Western? Can’t they see that there are benefits to Western ideas and civilisation? To paraphrase the words of Democratic Alliance leader, Helen Zille, “the legacy of colonialism was not only negative”.

But what all of this criticising misses is that the early ANC was precisely the kind of organisation that Apartheid apologists and moderate liberal scolds say would’ve been ideal and adequate. And they failed.

The early ANC was an organisation of highly educated, Westernised journalists, professionals and intellectuals who wanted gradual reform and Constitutionalism. It’s not that they were Gandhian, it’s that some of them thought Gandhi’s techniques was a bit too radical (Gandhi was their contemporary and lived in South Africa). People sometimes exaggerate how elitist they were. I don’t think they were elitist, I just think they were moderate and modern. They wanted Black people and White people to have the same opportunities, and for Black people to pour all their efforts into education for self upliftment.

What’s more, long before Russia or any other country entered the picture, the founders of the ANC were deeply interested in and attached the Western countries and _especially_ the United States. Most of the founders of the ANC spent time in the U.S. They corresponded with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B du Bois. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, and dozens after him, studied in the United States. He was a graduate of Columbia University. Seme was actually born on an American mission station in Natal.

Their early ideas about a future for South Africa were shaped by their admiration of Black Americans.

The article I posted with the picture is a biography of Pixley Seme, the founder of the ANC, by his alma mater, Columbia University. If you read it start to finish, it will dramatically recontextualise what the ANC is (or, to be honest, was). It will expose why the lamentations of conservatives and liberals around “moderation” are fundamentally flawed.

The early ANC was exactly the kind of “respectable”, “moderate” organisation that its modern critics wish it was. And that approach completely failed. Some of the things that Seme and some of his contemporaries said about colonialism, “Western civilization” and the like would make Helen Zille blush. But none of that mattered. Instead of a reduction in racism, the situation got worse before culminating in full blown Apartheid. It shouldn’t need to be said, but the reason Apartheid happened was because racists were racist. It really was that simple. And the more you read about it, the more shockingly obvious it becomes. Apartheid was an attempt to prevent the progress and advancement of Black South Africans, especially those who were most ambitious and most modern.

Only once you appreciate that the ANC tried what their critics now propose, and that it ended disastrously, will you understand what came later – Mandela, MK and all that. The ANC were the original milquetoast liberals who tried to appease fascists. I admire most of the founders of the ANC for many reasons – I wish we still had that type of leader around. But their failure is not something that should be swept under the rug. And, honestly, it has lessons for liberals in general beyond South Africa.