Book Launch

“The Congress Movement”

By Sylvia Neame

NEW BOOK NOTIFICATION
TO ORDER CONTACT: ON THE DOT | TEL: 021 918 8500 | FAX: 021918 8815 | EMAIL: orders@onthedot.co.za

THE CONGRESS MOVEMENT
The unfolding of the Congress Alliance 1912-1961
VOLUME 1: 1917–April 1926

http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2326&cat=0&page=1&featured

Author: Sylvia Neame
Pub month & year: May 2015
ISBN soft cover: 978-0-7969-2486-5
Format: 245 x 175 mm
Extent: 640 pages
Price: R490.00
Rights: World Rights

Volume 1 traces the unfolding of the congress movement from 1917 and looks at socialist and other
forces that played an integral part in its formation. The 1918–20 upsurge, which included an African
mineworkers’ strike, played a key role in this development and laid the basis in the 1920s for a partnership
between the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and the African National Congress.
About the book
Author Sylvia Neame’s study of the development of the national liberation movement in South Africa is
in stark contrast to the frequent depictions of the history of the ANC by leading academics as
fragmented, fractured and discontinuous. Not only does her analyses disprove the belief that the ANC’s
development has been episodic, several of the conclusions drawn point to its essential inner coherence.
Crucial to the development of the congress movement was the search for an alliance strategy that would
ensure the ANC its central role. Particularly striking, and essentially new, is the depiction of the various
alliance partners – including the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Communist Party
and the South African Congress of Trade Unions –and their complicated interaction.
The research, based on extensive primary and secondary sources including some eighty interviews
dating back to the early 1960s, uniquely combines narrative and analysis. The Congress Movement
invites the reader to engage in the fascinating development of the national liberation movement in South
Africa in its formative period and uncovers its outstanding continuities as well as the considerable range
of its methods.
About the author
Sylvia Neame obtained a BA at Rhodes University, majoring in history and social anthropology, with
distinction in history. Having won a scholarship to the University of the Witwatersrand, she completed a
history honours course in 1963–64 but was unable to write the examinations because of two stretches of
incarceration under the 90-day law, followed by trial and sentence for her political activities. She went
into exile in 1967, first to Britain and then to East Germany, where, at the University of Leipzig, after
having done a course in the German language and receiving a ‘Diplom’ (essentially an MA) in the field of
African history, she obtained a DPhil in 1976. She then spent 17 years in the Department of Africa and
Near East Studies, where she worked for a couple of years in its Africa Institute and thereafter in a
teaching and research institute, dealing with theoretical questions of national liberation.

NEW BOOK NOTIFICATION
TO ORDER CONTACT: ON THE DOT | TEL: 021 918 8500 | FAX: 021918 8815 | EMAIL: orders@onthedot.co.za
THE CONGRESS MOVEMENT
The unfolding of the Congress Alliance 1912-1961
VOLUME 2: April 1926–1928
Author: Sylvia Neame
Pub month & year: May 2015
ISBN soft cover: 978-0-7969-2487-2
Format: 245 x 175 mm
Extent: 592 pages
Price: R490.00
Rights: World Rights
Volume 2 examines the intricate development of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and the
African National Congress in the second half of the 1920s. Various trends of reformism and radicalism
affected these two organisations. This later led to the beginning of the breakup of the ICU with the
secession of the Natal contingent, in part under the influence of a narrow ethnic Zulu nationalism. The
breakaway also took place in the wake of an important phase in which the ICU leaders had
become identified with a peasant uprising on white farms.

THE CONGRESS MOVEMENT
The unfolding of the Congress Alliance 1912-1961
VOLUME 3: 1928–1961
Author: Sylvia Neame
Pub month & year: May 2015
ISBN soft cover: 978-0-7969-2488-9
Format: 245 x 175 mm
Extent: 640 pages
Price: R490.00
Rights: World Rights
Volume 3 explores how the ANC emerges and steps into its primary role as a national
liberation movement resulting from a complex process stretching from the 1920s to the
beginning of the 1960s. A key theme in this context is the integral role of the then Congress
Youth League leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo.