South Africa’s Radicals: The Anti-Apartheid Movement’s Forgotten Wing

South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement has tended to be narrated as a monolith, but in practice, this has allowed one wing of the struggle – the African National Congress (ANC) – to stand in for the entire thing. In this piece, we recover the politics of an alternative tendency, which we term South Africa’s radical tradition. Against the ANC’s strategy of a two-stage revolution – first to a racially inclusive democracy, second to socialism – South Africa’s radicals insisted that “stages” missed the point: these twin struggles were inseparable. We conclude by drawing lessons for activists fighting racial capitalism today, both in South Africa and around the globe.