The African National Congress (ANC) is the oldest and most durable of African nationalist movements, not only in South Africa but also across the continent. Since 1994, it has governed the country as leader of the Tripartite Alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and South African Communist Party (SACP). A decade and a half ago, at the joyful celebration of the “New South Africa”, the ANC and its allies had just buried apartheid for good. Today despite contradictions and strains, the alliance remains intact, its continued potency apparent in the rise of Jacob Zuma and fall of Thabo Mbeki. Behind the glamour of leaders lies the fact that working peoples of one form or another comprise the overwhelming majority of the ANC's constituency. Explaining the roots of this Alliance is important.

The immediate origins of this alliance in the passive resistance and defiance campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, in underground and exile politics from the 1960s, and UDF-led struggles of the 1980s are widely, if not always precisely, understood. Yet, what of its longer-term roots? What made the ANC amenable to such an alliance in the first place? How did it first experiment with loose coalitions or even looser forms of “unity in action”? How did the early ANC combine political and labour issues and what were its policies and actions? What were the views (where recorded at all) of workers themselves towards Congress? Previous analyses tend to be fragmentary, but answers to these questions enrich our understanding of the deeper causes that have cemented this “unity in action” which continue to influence South African politics today.

My focus is the formative period of engagement of these political and socioeconomic forces before permanent alliances emerged. The spotlight is squarely on the ANC but seen in its attitudes to, and relationships with the nascent formations of the black working class and in particular the most politically conscious and active workers. Where scanty records permit, I widen the scope to include migrant, rural, domestic, and women workers not always then clearly identified as part of a formal “working class”.