Your cattle are gone,

my countrymen!

Go rescue them!

Leave the breechloader alone

And turn to the pen.

Take paper and ink,

For that is your shield.

Your rights are going!

So pick up your pen.

Load it, load it with ink.

Sit on a chair.

Repair not to Hoho

But fire with your pen.

* (Hoho was the mountain-forest stronghold where Chief Sandile had been shot and killed).

This poem by Xhosa poet IW Citashe signalled the end of an era after the 19th century had seen the military conquest of all independent chiefdoms and kingdoms, following fierce resistance led, among others, by warrior-prophet Makhanda, who launched an attack on the Grahamstown garrison, decades of resistance by the Pedi under Sekhukhune, the Sotho under Moshoeshoe, and the Zulu under Cetshwayo.

The SA Native National Congress (SANNC), the initial name of the ANC, was formed as a direct political response to the unification of four white colonies. Britain effectively rewarded the former Boer and British colonists by handing over to them the fate of the black people. Efforts to extend the limited franchise enjoyed in the Cape to other provinces fell on deaf ears and even those rights were endangered and ultimately removed.

Establishing “Congress” was a dramatic achievement in that previously divided and even hostile peoples were brought together. The organisation was described by Pixley ka Isaka Seme as a “native union”, or sometimes it was referred to as a “national union”. Either term can be read as having connotations potentially undermining or at least being incompatible with the white Union of SA.

Within a year of Union, land seizures gained by conquest were amplified through legislation, leaving Africans with about 7.5 percent of the land, much of this arid and unusable. Almost overnight, thousands of African farmers were driven off the land, watching their stock die and many starved, memorably recorded by the first SANNC secretary-general, Sol Plaatje.

The early ANC was formed with leadership deriving mainly from the emerging middle class of lawyers, clerks, priests and journalists. If this was an elite, Peter Limb warns it was in no sense a “power elite”. It did not have access to any means of production, it was without political power and progressively, without the vote. It was an African intelligentsia without academies or publishing houses and an African peasantry without land.

The political character and development of the organisation was ambiguous and does not lend itself to labels in frequent use like “conservative”, “grovelling”, “timid”. It was an organisation that had to learn to operate in a new and difficult environment.

The discourse was also a reflection of the times. Some of the language of the time may jar people today, for example the motivation for establishing the ANC included helping the Union government to form a “common Native policy”.

While the SANNC united separate peoples, it was also in some respects exclusionary. Only African men were members. If its understanding of the nation-to-be was embodied in its membership clauses, it meant that the bearers of nationhood were only African men, not women or non-Africans.

This was not uncontested. Thus for a short period, non-Africans were admitted to the organisation in the Western Cape. Also, women, immediately and throughout the history of the organisation, challenged their exclusion through political actions. They may not have been constructed as political subjects by the ANC at its birth, but they constituted themselves, and in fact, from a very early stage engaged in their own activities in the public domain. Over the years the way the ANC came to understand itself and the-nation-to-be was to undergo substantial change and broadening.

What did it mean to build a movement that brought different peoples together in the early 20th century? First, the organisation had to present itself in a particular manner, with a specific political profile to reap maximum gains, given the context and power relations of the time.

Its engagement and the extravagant language used to address royalty cannot simply be dismissed as obsequious.

There were conventions of the time that had to be observed. But beyond this, there may always have been an element of irony and even subversion in some of the discourse.

Even the apparently most deferential aspects of early ANC activities carried multiple meanings.

In 1914, after the Land Act was passed, a petition was sent to King George to ask for intervention.

The language is effusive in expressions of loyalty to the Crown, petitioners describing themselves as “Your Majesty’s most loyal and humble subjects… always… loyal to Your Majesty’s throne and person…”

They refer to Queen Victoria “whose memory will never die with us, and whose most beautiful influence bound us to the British throne”.

These expressions of devotion are then used to ground a claim to rights.

They refer to proclamations of Queen Victoria laying down conditions of non-discrimination in the previous Natal colony. They claim that this comprised a contract binding the British government, “as guardian and protectors of the native races…”

They “most humbly pray” that the king should see that the “contract is implemented”.

Then there is subversion, in effect “divide and rule” in reverse. They say they “have never accepted the Union Government in place of the Crown, but have only accepted the Union Government as advisers of the Governor-General (the King’s representative), through their Ministers for and on behalf of the Crown”.

They seek friendly relations with the Union government. But in all matters affecting them adversely, they “look to Your Majesty for the security of their rights and protection of themselves and such rights as your Majesty’s subjects”.

What is seen here is an organisation emerging in a hostile terrain, trying to protect and recover rights, observing the conventions of the time, “constitutionalists without constitutional rights”.

Their messages were not simply naive pleading, but an attempt to drive a wedge between the Crown and Union government, albeit with little success.

Most significantly, the early ANC, in denying that the Union government replaced the Crown, claimed rights under the Crown. This was an embryonic assertion of political subjectivity.

A struggle for liberation is a journey, for it does not happen at one place at a single moment. The route is not always along a straight line and there may be disagreements about the best way to move, and even about the destination. One may also argue that, unlike most journeys, freedom is never finally realised. It may be deepened and broadened. There may also be setbacks and even reversals.

From its birth 100 years ago, the ANC sought to overcome a range of obstacles and simultaneously advance a vision of the future beyond what seemed possible at the time.

The organisation was never a monolith and there was disagreement over the route to follow.

Sometimes gains were made, possibly more often there were setbacks, usually at the hands of the oppressors, but sometimes through division or decisions that were later found to be flawed.

By the 1930s, petitioning had clearly failed and the organisation was geared to annual conferences rather than campaigning. At one point the ANC was practically moribund.

From the mid 1930s and into the 1940s, however, Reverend (later Canon) James Calata and Dr AB Xuma set about reviving and also setting the ANC on to an organised footing. They built branches and created a functioning administration, laying the basis for the development of the ANC into a mass organisation in the 1950s.

That decade was the moment of the Defiance campaign, when the organisation moved beyond seeking constitutional rights and denied allegiance or political obligation to the state. In so doing it was both a rupture and continuity with what had gone before.

While refusing to obey laws of the apartheid state, the ANC nevertheless continued to seek peaceful resolution of its differences with the government, requesting to meet in a national convention or other forum.

The 1950s opened a new phase of resistance.

The Freedom Volunteers who broke the law were known as amadel’akufa, “defiers of death”, because they pledged that they would face any danger, including death.

This was the ANC on the offensive. But the organisation followed this campaign with a creative turn. It advanced an alternative vision of the SA to be, through the mass Congress of the People Campaign leading to adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955.

Its broad inclusive message “provoked” the arrest of 156 leaders on high treason. The decade saw increasing violent repression of legal activities, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre and the banning of the ANC and PAC.

This again raised difficult challenges in adapting to illegality and embarking on armed struggle. The period that followed saw both setbacks and advances in the fortunes of the ANC and its allies. Significantly, this phase also saw the emergence of mass popular struggle on an unprecedented level. The combination of activities on a range of fronts, mass popular, underground, military and international, created a situation that made a negotiated settlement possible.

The ANC centenary is a time to reflect on its multiple legacies.

How can the bold visionary element, the willingness to venture beyond what was possible at the time be taken forward?

Now there is no longer the handicap of “constitutionalism without constitutional rights”. Given the will, the ANC and South Africans more broadly can realise the visions of the many heroes and heroines who strove to build an ever-broadening, inclusive and empowering democracy.

n Raymond Suttner was an underground operative and served two terms of imprisonment, lasting more than 10 years. He is author of Inside Apartheid’s Prison (2001) and The ANC Underground (2008). Suttner is a part-time professor at Rhodes University and emeritus professor at Unisa.