Reflections on Black Politics in South Africa since 1945

Abstract

When it appeared in 1983, Black Politics in South Africa offered a revised interpretation of developments in black South African politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. In comparison to existing academic and popular writing on this topic, Black Politics proposed that ANC-led resistance had much less organisational coherence than represented conventionally and that through the decade political opposition to apartheid would be shaped mainly by local dynamics and opportunities. This argument led to the exploration of different data sets and allowed new insights, in particular in showing how political organisations recruited among very specific social groups and in indicating the ways in which they were shaped by ‘inherent’ ideas or folk beliefs. A second section of the paper considers ways in which, if Black Politics were to be written afresh, the methodology and emphases might change in the light of fresh evidence and as a consequence of ANC's subsequent development up to the present.