The ten years from the end of the Second World War to the Congress of the People in 1955 were dominated by nationalism and its instrumental value as a mobilisation tool. But the South African resistance movement differed from anti-colonial national liberation movements elsewhere in Africa because of the acceptance by black nationalists, socialists, liberals and others of the permanence of whites and the complexities of developing a national liberation struggle based on broad racial co-operation rather than racial exclusiveness. Multiracialism – separate racially based organisations co-operating in a single alliance under African leadership – evolved from attempts to marry African nationalism and racial co-operation. Awkwardly, the multiracial Congress Alliance had a non-racial future as its goal, while smaller competing organisations such as the Liberal Party (LP) had both a non-racial structure and a non-racial goal.

By 1955 the Congress movement had attained the organisational unity necessary to implement the Congress of the People campaign and codify its non-racial vision in the Freedom Charter. The theory of internal colonialism, which appealed to white libera l intellectuals as much as to the new South African Communist Party (SACP), was, in part, a solution to the challenge of how an African nationalist movement (with supporter s from all race groups) in a global context dominated by decolonisation should deal with the local white population, which was both large (by African standards) and permanent.

The ANC's endorsement of the Freedom Charter was followed by the arrest of 156 Congress Alliance members of all races on charges of treason. The resultant power vacuu m was used to good effect by Africanists opposed to the non-racial nature of the charter and to the Alliance. Africanists, like the Liberal Party (LP), focused their attacks on the South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD), which they characterised as an organisation of white communists who dominated the African National Congress (ANC) and wrote the Freedom Charter to further communist aims via (presumably) nationalisation and other clauses.

By couching their attacks in predominantly anti-communist rather than anti-white terms Africanists won the support of a significant section of the Liberal Party, as well as that of some former Communist Party members and other left-wingers, who called for the pursuit of class struggle by means of a single, mass-based non-racial congress.