Anton Muziwakhe Lembede

Anton Muziwakhe Lembede (1913-1947), South African black nationalist thinker, one of the founders and first president of the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC). Born near Durban, in eastern South Africa, Lembede was the son of Zulu farm workers who struggled to send him to primary school. However after two years he had to leave and go to work as a kitchen boy for an Indian family. He saved to put himself back in school. In 1933 Lembede won a scholarship to Adams Teacher Training College, the Congregational Church institution, whose teachers included future ANC leaders Albert Luthuli and Z. K. Matthews. Lembede had a passion for learning, and while teaching he mastered the Afrikaans and Sesotho languages. He was also schooled through correspondence courses, studying Latin, philosophy, and Roman-Dutch law. In 1943 he moved to Johannesburg where he was an apprentice of Pixley Ka Izaka Seme, a black lawyer who was one of the founders of the African Native National Congress, which became the ANC. At its annual congress, in December 1943, the ANC agreed to form a Youth League; the initial group, which included Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, was chaired by Lembede. They met in his office and the league came into being in 1944 with the reluctant consent of Alfred Xuma, the more conservative ANC president.

In 1944 Lembede became president of the league and Oliver Tambo the secretary. The league propagated “Africanism” and its motto was “Africa's cause must triumph.” It was radical and militant, and attacked earlier ANC tactics as too polite. Lembede argued that African nationalism should be based upon socialism and democracy and that spiritually it should look to the African past. He rejected the idea of “foreign” leadership and argued that black Africans must provide their own leadership and rely upon themselves. It was the beginning of a more militant nationalism that influenced the new generation of ANC leaders such as Tambo, Mandela, and Walter Sisulu, and made the ANC into a mass movement. In October 1946, at a crisis conference of the ANC, Lembede and Moses Kotane supported the radical motion just passed by the Natives Representation Council (NRC) to abolish all racially discriminatory legislation.