Who's got the power? (South Africa in Focus).(South Africa's leading political parties)(Brief Article)

The Tripartite Alliance, a political bloc consisting of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), was the main political force in bringing apartheid to an end, and their joint political ticket dominates the new government. But severe political strains have been building within the Alliance over the past year which threaten its future existence.

The ANC is the oldest "national liberation movement" in sub-Saharan Africa. Founded in 1912, it was established by members of an emerging black elite who were frustrated with and excluded from white-dominated politics. Originally, its politics were liberal and its methods were purely nonviolent and constitutional.

The ANC adopted a more radical course in the late 1920s, partly due to the spread of Marxism and the founding of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1921. Several ANC members, including Secretary General E.J. Khaile, joined the CPSA. The first black trade unions were formed at about the same time, steering the ANC toward a more militant course.

After the National Party ushered in full apartheid in 1948, opposition parties and trade unions in South Africa faced grave threats. The CPSA was banned in 1950 and secretly re-created "underground" as the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1953. The ANC was banned in 1960, shortly after the infamous Sharpeville massacre, and soon afterwards formed an armed wing called Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)--"Spear of the Nation." SACP leaders such as Joe Slovo and Chris Hani became prominent and hugely popular national leaders of the ANC and MK.

With the support of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), a SACP-affiliated organization, the ANC organized the Congress of the People in June 1955, at which a broad multiracial coalition of anti-apartheid groups known as the Congress Alliance adopted the Freedom Charter. The Charter became the manifesto of the anti-apartheid movement, calling for universal adult suffrage as well as several broadly socialist measures, such as the nationalization of major industries and the redistribution of land.

The growing bonds between the ANC and the SACP provoked a backlash from the ANC's more nationalistic factions. In the late 1950s, a group of "Africanists" led by Robert Sobukwe formally broke from the movement to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). This move had its intellectual counterpart in the Black Consciousness ...