Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, commonly referred to by his initials as Dr AB Xuma [1][2] (March 8, 1893– January 27, 1962) [1] [2] was a South African leader and activist and president-general of the African National Congress (ANC) from 1940 to 1949.[3] He was a member of the African American founded Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.[4]
Although on the left wing of the ANC, Xuma was seen during his leadership as too conservative by an increasingly impatient and activist youth, which he regarded in turn with suspicion. (His letters to colleagues are understood to be full of hostile references to communists.) As such, he was widely regarded as out of touch with the needs and demands of the grassroots.[5]
Nevertheless, it was under his leadership, albeit after having been very cannily lobbied, and in spite of warnings from his colleagues that it would lead to his downfall, that the ANC in 1942 established its Youth League.[6]
A young Nelson Mandela was among the callow buttonholers (including Walter Sisulu, Congress Mbata and William Nkomo)[7] who in 1944 visited his home in Sophiatown to agitate for his acceptance of the league's manifesto and draft constitution. Mandela recalls having been impressed at how "grand" was Dr Xuma's house, as well as by his revitalisation of the ANC: Xuma had succeeded in regularising membership and subscriptions, and had greatly improved the movement's finances. To Mandela, however, and many other young Africans of the time,
he represented the old way of doing things: deputations, statements, committees—gentlemen politics in the British tradition. As a man so recently being groomed to become a 'black Englishman' himself, Mandela understood how all that worked. But now there were new voices around him, offering a more militant approach.[8]
Xuma responded angrily and sarcastically after reading what he called their "high-learned" manifesto, which explicitly criticised the ANC's failure to advance the national cause, as well as its deficiencies in organisation and constitution, and its "erratic policy of yielding to oppression, regarding itself as a body of gentlemen with clean hands." Xuma rounded on the deputation for usurping the authority of the ANC national executive, but refrained from criticising publicly a cause he had publicly championed. Thus outmanoeuvred, he gave the ANC Youth League his blessing, having secured an agreement that the ANC itself would remain the dominant body[9]
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