National democratic discourse since the mid-1950s has been the preeminent expression of anti-colonial nationalism in South Africa. The year 1955 is, schematically, a moment of rupture. At least until the end of the 1940s, opposition to racial segregation and apartheid was framed in the terms of Cape liberalism and Christianity. More radical expressions of dissent found expression, not so much in and through the politics of Pan-Africanism, than in terms of Garveyism (Walshe, 1973: 24). Within the African National Congress (ANC), Garveyite ideas were especially influential in the organisation's Youth League. As late as 1948, for example, the ‘Basic Policy of the Congress Youth League’ included the Garveyite slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’, though other more-militant slogans proved to be unpopular.

A mere seven years later, there had been a sea change in the trajectory and form of nationalist struggle. We can get a sense of it by comparing the Youth League slogan above with the key statement of the Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People in June 1955. ‘South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, white and black,’ it proclaimed. Yet ambivalence regarding Garveyism within the ANC could already be detected as early as 1943. In that year, the ANC issued ‘Africans’ Claims’, the organisation's reaction to the Atlantic Charter signed in 1941. ‘Africans’ Claims’ called for the granting to Africans of ‘full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa’ (ANC, 1943). It envisaged a cosmopolitan community composed of Africans and Europeans, and in this sense anticipated the Freedom Charter by more than a decade. Yet there is an important difference between the Freedom Charter and ‘Africans’ Claims’. If the latter reflected a brief (and perhaps expedient) engagement with liberalism, the Freedom Charter suggested the growing influence of Communists in the alliance, the rising importance of Marxist-Leninist concepts and terms and, most importantly, the emergence of the theory of national democratic revolution (NDR; see below) as the pre-eminent expression of African nationalism in South Africa. Today, although its concepts and practices are increasingly giving way to others, NDR's vocabulary continues to inform ANC policy statements and its lexicon, i.e. the dayto- day language of politicians and senior government officials.