International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Africans in South Africa fought from the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and throughout the Republic, established in 1921, to the country's first non-racial democratic elections in 1994. This national liberation struggle for Africans was marked by a number of critical ideological and organizational turning points. Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) , the iconic figure of this struggle who spent 27 years in prison, spoke of it as “the long walk to freedom” ( Mandela 1994 ). Throughout the “long walk,” African nationalism provided a central means of conducting the struggle, and of imagining and contesting the nature of a post-apartheid nation. African nationalism is often loosely understood to mean all political actions and ideas deployed to realize African rights and black majority rule, but this can be questioned. Throughout the African national liberation struggle, and even beyond, there has been a tradition of understanding the emancipation of the majority as in class terms, with the struggle seen as against capitalism. In this sense, a “workerist” approach stressing conflict between labor and capital and socialist transformation existed alongside a “nationalist” definition centered on an end of racial oppression through state power and a reimagining of nationhood ( Alexander 1986 ). Donovan Williams (1970) understood African nationalism to be a form of African consciousness, ... log in or subscribe to read full text