Blurred lines and ideological divisions in South African youth politics

Abstract

Ideological affiliations like Africanism, charterism, and Black Consciousness shaped the political boundaries of student and youth political groups in South Africa during the tumultuous 1980s. These delineations have also been used in the secondary literature to understand organizational competition and when considering how young activists negotiated contested political ground. However, this article suggests that the boundaries between opposing organizations were often blurred by their overlapping use of competing ideologies; it further argues that these divisions, although articulated ideologically, were rooted in organizational affiliation and competition for political influence and territory. It analyses the ideological development of the Congress of South African Students, the Azanian Students' Organization, and the South African Youth Congress, and tracks the changing scope for ideological expression within charterist student and youth formations. It suggests that during the 1980s the scope for differing ideological expression narrowed, and links this process to the ANC's efforts to establish hegemony within the charterist movement. The article finally extends this analysis to the ANC Youth League's use of ideology after apartheid, and considers how ideological difference within youth politics is beginning to be expressed outside the fold of charterism.

Student/teachers from Turfloop: the propagation of Black Consciousness in South African schools, 1972–76

“…But by the 1980s, after harsh state repression against Black Consciousness organizations and a successful return to above-ground organizing by the ANC through proxies including the United Democratic Front (UDF), Charterism was in the ascendancy once more. I have argued elsewhere that, during the 1980s and early 1990s, the ANC ‘achieved hegemony by absorbing opposing ideologies, particularly aspects of Black Consciousness and Africanism, into the fold of its nonracialism’ (Heffernan 2016: 665) 3 . The ANC's success in this regard has a great deal to tell us about its political dominance in the post-apartheid era, and the concomitant marginalization of competing racialized political ideas such as Black Consciousness.…”

Ideas and Political Mobilization in Africa

“…But the ideas that Black Consciousness had championed still endured, especially among students. In the early 1980s whole branches of the new ANC-affiliated Congress of South African Students (COSAS) continued to espouse Black Consciousness (Heffernan 2016). Decades later, when university students erupted in South Africa's largest post-apartheid protests to date, Black Consciousness was in the headlines again.…”