The rupture between the Congress of the People (Cope) and the mother body of the African National Congress (ANC) was fraught with personal and political sacrifice. It happened in the extended heat of Mbeki's Polokwane defeat and a period of antagonistic populist mobilisation. For a short while it appeared as if the original liberation movement ideals and 1994 settlement principles were under threat. When the anger subsided and the ANC returned to stasis the new party's foothold faded.

What was left caved in under internecine leadership duels. Cope joined the ranks of the micro-parties, as judged in the 2011 local elections, yet retained residual power bases in Parliament and the provincial legislatures, courtesy of the 2009 electoral verdicts. The curse of Cope was that it captured its high levels of national and provincial representation on the wings of the last of the Polokwane revolt. Its official representation was far higher than post-election support mobilised on the ground. It was falling apart, but courtesy of its special origins could not just be another micro-party. It was a haunted anomaly, which would not go away.

The story of Cope that unfolds in this chapter is equally an ANC story. Cope carried both the strains of an ordinary small and new opposition party, and a party burdened with the reputation of being the offspring of the ANC. Cope had broken away but had hardly cut the umbilical cord. It remained defined by its relationship to the ANC. It was expected to be a ‘legitimate opposition party’, with legitimacy closely linked to the status of opposition-cracking-the-race-ceiling. The Cope tale was that of a party that emerged with fanfare in a time of intense polarisation in national and ANC politics, survived an election, and then had to shape and grow itself in times of the normalisation of the ANC and national politics. It complicated matters that Cope was beset with internal leadership, organisational, identity strife and hence institutionalisation problems.