African National Congress

HISTORY: Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it advocated black representation in Parliament and the elimination of discrimination. The current name was adopted in 1923. Initially, the ANC provided a forum where protests against the white government could be voiced. In 1949, urged on by younger members, it adopted a more militant program of boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. In 1955, it adopted a Freedom Charter, demanding an end to white-minority rule and outlining a multiracial South Africa.

The July 20 editorial on South Africa is insane. Why would you encourage our President to meet with the communist cutthroats of the African National Congress? Is it so Nelson Mandela et. al. can do to South Africa what Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe and Jean-Bedel Bokassa have done to the rest of Africa? Your ideology stinks. Joe Parfitt Sugarloaf, Pa.

THE WISDOM OF NOBEL PRIZE-WINNER NELSON MANDELA "If the government should say: 'Gentlemen, we cannot have this state of affairs . . . let's talk,' I would say: 'Yes, let's talk. "' -- Mandela at a 1959 treason trial "We are not anti-white. We are against white supremacy. " -- Mandela at the same trial "Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return. " -- letter smuggled from prison, read to his followers in 1985 "I now consider it necessary in the national interest for the African National Congress and the government to meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement.

Kader Asmal, 76, a prominent member of South Africa's governing African National Congress who pressed his party to keep its democratic promises, died Wednesday in a Cape Town hospital, the ANC said. No cause of death was given. Mr. Asmal led antiapartheid protests as a high school student in rural eastern South Africa. He later left for Britain and Ireland, where he continued antiapartheid activism and studied and taught law. He returned to South Africa in 1990 and participated in negotiations that ended apartheid.

On May 9, 1994, Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress was elected president of South Africa. He promised to effect political and economic change. On Jan. 17, 1996, 31 members of the South African Tri-partite Alliance - the African National Congress, the South Africa Communist Party, and the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions - descended on the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to study America's economic structure and the global economy to help meet that promise.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Albertina Sisulu lamented what apartheid did to her family, but lived to see her children become leaders in South Africa. The veteran of the anti-apartheid movement died yesterday at the age of 92. Her husband, Walter Sisulu, who died in 2003, spent 25 years in custody on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, whom he had brought into the African national Congress, now South Africa's governing party. Mandela was the best man when Walter and Albertina married in 1944.

Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk will receive the Liberty Medal from President Clinton at Independence Hall on the afternoon of July 4, but freedom won't stop ringing then, even for the day. Mandela has a second event for the 4th - a rally and fund-raiser for his African National Congress at the Civic Center that night. "We wanted to give everyday working people, who will not be able to interact with him at the earlier event, a chance to hear him speak," said Lana Felton-Ghee, of the Philadelphia Welcome Mandela Committee, which is organizing the event.

The conviction of three young men in South Africa last week for the killing of Amy Biehl, a white American student who had ventured into a black township, points to a question mark hanging over the future of the country. Politicized youth were once in the vanguard of the struggle against apartheid. But where do they fit into the new South Africa? In a speech last spring, President Nelson Mandela lamented the transformation of what his African National Congress called "young lions.

Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d suggested yesterday that U.S. tax dollars be used to support the African National Congress and other groups advocating multiracial democracy in South Africa. Such a move would represent a historic first for the United States, which has not previously provided direct support to opposition groups in South Africa. Talking with reporters as he flew to Africa, Baker said that assistance from the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy would be a way of showing the American commitment to end apartheid in South Africa.

The excesses of South Africa's security apparatus have long been known - the terror its troopers inflicted on the black townships, the death of prisoners in detention, the cattle prods, whips and water cannon, the torture and assassination. All of it in futile support of the unsupportable, the apartheid system that has fallen formally (if not totally) as President F. W. deKlerk and his one-time prisoner, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, struggle to shape a new future.

Heidi Holland, 64, a journalist and author who chronicled the rise of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe from freedom fighter to power-obsessed leader, died Saturday at her home in South Africa, police said. Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale said a gardener found Ms. Holland's body in her home in Melville, a suburb of Johannesburg after an apparent suicide. Mogale said there were no signs of foul play, nor any items missing from her home to suggest a burglary. Ms. Holland grew up in Zimbabwe, then white-controlled Rhodesia, but described in her 2008 book, Dinner With Mugabe , her sympathy for the future president and others fighting to turn control of the nation back to black Africans.

BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa - Tens of thousands of chanting and dancing revelers waved the green and gold colors of the African National Congress as Africa's oldest liberation movement celebrated its 100th anniversary Sunday, though many South Africans say the party has not delivered on its promises since taking power in 1994. A dozen African leaders and more former heads of state along with African kings and chieftains attended a midnight ceremony where President Jacob Zuma lit a flame, expected to stay alight the entire year, at the redbrick, tin-roofed Wesleyan church where black intellectuals and activists founded the party in 1912.

Kader Asmal, 76, a prominent member of South Africa's governing African National Congress who pressed his party to keep its democratic promises, died Wednesday in a Cape Town hospital, the ANC said. No cause of death was given. Mr. Asmal led antiapartheid protests as a high school student in rural eastern South Africa. He later left for Britain and Ireland, where he continued antiapartheid activism and studied and taught law. He returned to South Africa in 1990 and participated in negotiations that ended apartheid.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Albertina Sisulu lamented what apartheid did to her family, but lived to see her children become leaders in South Africa. The veteran of the anti-apartheid movement died yesterday at the age of 92. Her husband, Walter Sisulu, who died in 2003, spent 25 years in custody on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, whom he had brought into the African national Congress, now South Africa's governing party. Mandela was the best man when Walter and Albertina married in 1944.

Carel Boshoff, 83, the founder of South Africa's whites-only, separatist town Orania, died of cancer Wednesday. Dr. Boshoff founded the privately owned town of 900 people, in South Africa's northern province, in 1991 as South Africa transitioned from a white-ruled apartheid government to a democracy. Orania's goal was to preserve the culture of Afrikaners, one of South Africa's white minority groups. Its residents speak Afrikaans, sing traditional folk songs, attend the Dutch Reformed Church, and celebrate Afrikaans holidays.

South Africans waited in long lines yesterday to vote in their third election since the end of white rule, hoping to prod their government to keep its promises to improve their lives. "We are struggling, and we want something better," said Nomalanga Shongwe, 33, sticking up a purple-painted thumb to show that she had voted. Like the vast majority of South Africans, Shongwe favors the ruling African National Congress, which led the drive to end white rule a decade ago. Returns won't be complete for several days, but the ANC appeared poised for landslide victories in provincial and parliamentary elections, which would bring President Thabo Mbeki a second five-year term.

Even the folks with creaky knees gamely attempted Rockette-style kicks to the pulsating rhythms of Sharon Katz & the Peace Train the other night. Oh, was this largely boomer crowd going to feel it in the morning! But as Katz and her five-piece band rolled out their infectious brand of African high-life, even the most sedentary in the crowd at North by Northwest, the Mount Airy bar and eatery, couldn't help but muster a toe-tap or a finger-pop. Bridging racial and cultural divides through music is Katz's life's work.

Depicting her native South Africa as a wealthy country ravaged by deep-seated poverty, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said little had changed since the country elected its first black president six years ago: Unemployment and illiteracy remain high among the country's black majority. "We have been destroyed and left in the dirt by the apartheid monsters," the South African Parliament member told about 300 Rowan University students yesterday during her U.S. tour, which she said would help her understand how Americans live in relative harmony.

Five years after it emerged from the shadows of apartheid, South Africa took another step last week to establish itself among the world's democracies by electing Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to replace retiring President Nelson Mandela. Nearly two-thirds of the voters endorsed the African National Congress and the erudite Mbeki, a 56-year-old former exile trained as an economist. The ANC has now moved comfortably into power in Pretoria, less than a decade after the former white minority government scorned it as a terrorist liberation movement.

A South African judge blocked the release of a watershed human rights report today while he considered a challenge to its findings by the ruling African National Congress. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to have released the 2,500-page report to journalists ahead of the formal handover today by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu to President Nelson Mandela. But Judge Wilfred Thring in Cape Town ordered the panel to withhold the report from journalists while he held a hearing on the ANC's application to block the report.