The African National Congress (ANC) is a South African social-democratic political party. It is a liberation organization famed for its fight to apartheid that has governed South Africa since 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa in the first post-apartheid election. Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC’s current President, has been in office since December 18, 2017.
The South African Native National Congress (SANNC), founded on January 8, 1912 in Bloemfontein, was organized to struggle for the rights of black South Africans using moderate methods. When the National Party took office in 1948, the ANC’s primary goal became to challenge the new government’s policy of institutionalised apartheid.
To that purpose, its organizational methods and means altered; its adoption of mass-politics strategies, as well as the expansion of its membership, culminated in the Defiance Campaign of civil disobedience in 1952-53. The South African government banned the ANC from April 1960, shortly after the Sharpeville massacre, and February 1990.
Despite intermittent attempts to resurrect its domestic political underground, the ANC was forced into exile during this period by escalating governmental repression, which saw many of its leaders imprisoned on Robben Island. The exiled ANC, headquartered in Lusaka, Zambia, devoted much of its attention to a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare against the apartheid state, which was carried out through its military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, which was founded in 1961 in collaboration with the South African Communist Party (SACP). The governments of South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom all labeled the ANC as a terrorist organization. It did, however, establish itself as a crucial actor in the discussions to abolish apartheid, which began in earnest once the ban was lifted in 1990.
In the post-apartheid era, the ANC remains primarily a liberation movement, despite being a registered political party. It has preserved a substantial electoral majority at the national level and in most provinces, thanks in part to its Tripartite Alliance with the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and has provided each of South Africa’s five presidents since 1994. South Africa is regarded as a one-party state.
However, the ANC’s electoral majority has steadily fallen since 2004, and its share of the national vote fell below 50% for the first time ever in the most recent elections, the 2021 municipal elections.
The party has been entangled in a variety of controversies over the last decade, most notably numerous claims of political corruption among its members.
