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Communists are splitting ANC

What has happened in the ANC recently should not have come as a surprise to anyone. An alliance with the South African Communist Party, which was a white organisation when it was founded in 1921, was the ANC's undoing.

What has happened in the ANC recently should not have come as a surprise to anyone. An alliance with the South African Communist Party, which was a white organisation when it was founded in 1921, was the ANC's undoing.

Many African leaders who had political foresight opposed the alliance with the communists. One such leader was ANC founding member Pixley ka Isaka Seme. As a guest of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the early 1920s, Sol Tshekisho Plaatje must have also opposed the alliance. Garvey was against the communists because they regarded the struggle of Africans on the continent and abroad as the workers' struggle. Garvey said the communists regarded blacks as expendable.

In the 1940s, Anton Lembede, founding president of the ANCYL, said it and after him former ANCYL member and founding president of the PAC Robert Sobukwe said it.

The ANC should have learnt from the 1955 Freedom Charter, whose origins the Africanists in the ANC were questioning. The Africanists left the Charterists and followed in the footsteps of the ANC of 1912. Now the ANC of 1955 is threatened with a split because of the SACP-Cosatu-ANCYL driven palace coup.

Sam Ditshego, Kagiso

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