AfricaIs aCountry

Africa’s oldest liberation movement is 100 years old

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Africa’s oldest liberation movement is 100 years old

By
Sean Jacobs

Does South Africa's ruling ANC still fight for the same values it championed 100 years ago?

Jubilant crowds listening to the speech of President Nelson Mandela. 10/May/1994. UN photo credit Sattleberger.

This week 100 years ago, South Africa’s current ruling party, the African National Congress, was born. It would go on to dominate resistance politics against Apartheid. Many assume today’s ANC is very different from that of its founders or its high points in the 1950s and later through the 1980s and 1990s. “Does South Africa’s ruling ANC still fight for the same values it championed 100 years ago?” was the theme for Al Jazeera English program, “The Stream.”

The producers invited me help answer this and other questions about the ANC so I traveled down to Washington D.C. The show is presented by Derek Ashong. Remember him? He is also a rapper. He was joined by guest host Latoya Patterson (she’s also a blogger at Racialicious). The show is live, fast paced and incorporates social media. Unfortunately technical difficulties meant it was hard to hear the inputs of the other 2 guests – Keith Khoza, ANC spokesperson, and journalist and commentator Karima Brown – linked to the studio via Skype. The video, above, of the show also includes a 10-minute post-show which was streamed online after the TV channel returned to its regular programming. It’s riveting stuff, if I should say so myself.

Thanks to producer Melissa Giaimo for inviting me. My wife should take credit for suggesting I wear the nice pink shirt.

Watch it here.

 

Further Reading

Atayese

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Gen Z’s electoral dilemma

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A world reimagined in Black

By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.

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Nigeria’s insecurity cannot be solved by foreign airstrikes or a failing state, but by rebuilding democratic, community-rooted systems of collective self-defense.