Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the ANC Youth League

Abstract

In The Rise and Fall of the ANC Youth League, the author intends to revive the activism of South Africa’s African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) and end ‘the perception that the organisation is a get-rich-quick scheme’. The book is a commendable effort to tell the story of the dying organisation and is written by an insider (the author is a former member of the ANCYL National Task Team). The ANCYL has an illustrious history, having been founded by such ANC luminaries as Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, and Oliver Tambo in 1944. Buoyed by youthful militancy, one of the founding impulses of the Youth League was to make the ANC more accessible to ordinary South Africans who felt, more keenly and direly, the racial injustices that preceded apartheid and were codified into law after 1948.