African National Congress: At a Glance
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The African National Congress (ANC) is a South African political party and Black nationalist organization. Since 1994, it has been the ruling party of South Africa.
It was founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress; its main goal was maintaining voting rights for Black people and people of mixed race in South Africa’s Cape Province. The organization was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. From the 1940s it spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination, and the ANC Youth League, founded in 1944, galvanized the movement.
The ANC was banned from 1960 to 1990 by the white South African government. Denied legal avenues for political change, the ANC operated underground and outside South African territory. In 1961 an ANC military organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), was formed to carry out acts of sabotage as part of its campaign against apartheid. Many ANC members were imprisoned.
The ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990 as apartheid began to unravel. Nelson Mandela succeeded Oliver Tambo as ANC president in 1991. In 1994 the ANC swept the country’s first elections based on universal suffrage, and Mandela became South Africa’s first Black president. In 1997 Thabo Mbeki replaced him as president of the ANC. In a contentious leadership battle, Jacob Zuma was selected to succeed Mbeki as ANC president in 2007. Zuma was succeeded by Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC president in 2017.