Description
When the African National Congress, the ANC, negotiated a transition of government and power in South Africa in the early 1990s they gained widespread respect and legitimacy when Nelson Mandela was voted in as president in 1994. In this controversial and radical critique of the ANC and the struggle for liberation in South Africa, McKinley challenges conventional public perceptions of the organisation and its celebrated rise to power. He offers a detailed analysis of the ANC’s leadership, tactics and strategies from the 1920s, through the years of exile, to the 1990s, including its close alliance with the South African Communist Party. He reveals that the organisation, despite historical claims to the contrary, failed to stay in touch with the South African masses. He maintains that the ANC made fundamental compromises to gain political power, and in so doing has ensured that the economic power-base of the ruling elites in post-apartheid South Africa remains essentially unaltered.