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It was launched in Bloemfontein by about 65 black community leaders and a few professionals such as educationists whose wish was to promote the black people’s social, economic, political and cultural rights and aspirations first and foremost throughout the four provinces of the then two-year-old Union of South Africa, and by and large, right across the length and breadth of the continent.
The moving spirit behind the historic development was a young attorney, Pixley Ka Isaka Seme, who had been educated at Columbia University in the United States and also at Oxford’s Jesus College in the United Kingdom.
He had initially discussed the idea to start an African-led political party with three other black lawyers, also foreign educated the previous year, 1911. The three were Richard Msimang, Alfred Mangena and George Montsioa.
When these men with a vision sold the idea to recognised black community leaders in the Cape Province, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, it was most enthusiastically received.
With Pixley Ka Seme leading the organisational team, the lawyers brought together 400 people in Bloemfontein to found what they named South African Native Congress. Some campaigned far and wide for unity among the black people for several months before the Bloemfontein event.
In October 1911 he had sent an article to a King Williamstown newspaper, Imvo zabatsundu (Black People’s Opinion) in which he said “the demon of racialism must be buried and forgotten, it has shed among us sufficient blood. We are one people. These divisions, these jealousies are the cause of all our woes and all our backwardness and ignorance today.”
The newspaper had been founded by John Tengo Jabavu, a Lovedale College-turned school teacher who had, however, left teaching because he stated his heart was in journalism.
At Bloemfontein, Seme spoke more or less in the same spirit as that of his article published some three months earlier. He told the excited delegates and observers:
“This is the first time that so many elements representing different tongues and tribes ever attempted to co-operate under one umbrella.”
He observed that the white people formed a union of South Africa in which “the black people would be turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water for the whites”.
He added that it was a union in which Africans had no voice in the making of its laws and no part in its administration. By then, the union was two years old.
The launching of the organisation was full of dramatic singing and prayer. Two songs were sung thus indelibly etching them into the pages of South Africa’s history.
One was titled “Give a thought to Africa” composed by John Knox Bokwe, and the other was the immortal African national anthem “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrica” (God bless Africa) composed by a Johannesburg school teacher, Enoch Sontonga in 1897.
Hymns were also sung expressing the people’s wish and hope in divine intervention. It was not only a historic occasion but a highly emotionally charged experience. But true to the deplorable racialism of that period, nothing was published by the white-owned newspapers about the event not even a filler-sized piece.
The delegates elected the Reverend John Dube of Natal to be the SANNC president, Sol Plaatje to be the secretary general, Seme to be the treasurer, George Montsioa was elected recording secretary and Tomas Mapikela became the speaker (chairman).
A well-known member of what was called the Cape Provincial Council, Dr Walter Rubusana, and 22 traditional chiefs were appointed honorary presidents.
The SANNC founding fathers’ approach to their country’s political problems was based on the sense of “justice and goodwill” as propounded by Christianity. Virtually all those leaders were educationists, products of mission schools such as Lovedale, Healdtown, Adams College, Marianhill and others including Ohlange of which the newly elected SANNC president Rev Dube was the principal.
The SANNC’s immediate task was two-fold. It had to deal with the rabid racialism practised in the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State much more than in the former British administrated territories of the Cape colony and Natal. It also had to get the union government to reverse the racially inequitable land distribution system which by that time had given 7, 5 percent of the country’s land surface of the black people who comprised 67.3 percent of the population.
The previous year, a national census had been conducted and it established that the country’s population was 5 973 394, of this number, 4 019 006 were black people and 12 762 were white. Indians were 152 203 and people of mixed blood (Coloureds) were 525 943.
Africans were forcibly removed from their traditional areas of domicile and dumped in what were derogatively called “native reserves.” Cecil John Rhodes was at that time the Cape Colony’s Native Affairs Minister and also prime minister of the territory under Britain. When he introduced “the land law” (in its early form) in the Cape colonial parliament on 27 July 1894 he said it was a “Native Bill for Africa”.
It was later passed by the House as the Glen Gray Act. That law reduced most drastically the size of land each black family could hold and till. According to the Act, only the first son of each family could inherit the tiny holding in what were called “native reserves.”
The part held by the black people was the poorest of the initial area affected by mother Glen Grey Act, so named because it targeted the Glen District in the Eastern Cape colony. It is historically important to point out that the same law was used by Rhodes in Southern Rhodesia to create “native reserves” in Matabeleland and Mashonaland the very same year (1894).
The purpose of that law was to create a great deal of shortage of land among Africans, a development that would force them to European owned farms and mines.
In 1913 the Act was amended following a recommendation by the Beaumont Commission that the size of the land meant for the black people be increased to just about 13 percent of South Africa’s area. The commission was chaired by Sir William Beaumont, a high court judge.
The situation remained more or less unchanged until 1936 when General Barry Munnnik Heztzog introduced the Natives Trust and Land Act which increased the African size of land to slightly more than 13 percent.
The SAANC had been opposing that Act tooth and nail since it was launched in 1912, keeping alive the nationalist spirit of African chiefs and heroes such as Hintsa, Sigcau, Dingaan and the unforgettable Cetshwayo and the lion-hearted Nxele in 1919. In 1919, the SANCC added the following to its founding 1912 constitution.
- To propose laws for the benefit of the Africans and to lay these before the Government for their adoption
- To educate Africans on their rights, duties and obligations and to promote mutual help and feeling of brotherhood among them.
- To express the opinions of Africans and to formulate a standard policy on native affairs for the benefit of the union parliament.
- To discourage racism and tribal feuds
- To inform white legislative bodies and white public general of African needs and aspirations.
- To agitate by just means for the removal of colour bar in politics, education and industry and for equitable representation of Africans in those public bodies vested with legislative powers to record African grievances and to seek their redress by constitutional means obtaining legal and financial aid when necessary.
It is clear that the organisation was bending over backward to show that all it wanted was for the black people to be granted their fundamental human rights and that they would try to achieve them within the country’s constitution.
This was, to all intents and practice, a reformist and not a revolutionary approach.
It was inevitably so because the SANNC leadership was by then seeking to be accommodated within the white dominated social economic system rather than to take full control of the political, economic and social structures of the country.
This stance changed within the passage of time as the party’s leadership became more exposed to more and yet more repressive laws and racial discriminatory measures. Not only black political leadership but the black people throughout the land were made to feel inferior to the white race in every sphere of life, political, social, economic and cultural.
That was what the Boer regime termed baaskap in practical application.
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