The early ANC did not grasp many opportunities to build stronger ties with working people. Lacking resources and facing many state restrictions, the ANC found it difficult to penetrate the mines and farms, or the equally closedin world of domestic workers. This is not surprising, as even the CPSA and black unions, absolutely committed to the cause of such workers, also failed abysmally in these sectors. The ANC had inconsistencies in its policies, switching back and forth from a softly-softly, hamba kahle to a more strident protest approach. This was largely the product of the class composition of its leaders and the impact of ideologies that preached moderation. Perhaps most fundamentally, the ANC at all levels failed to mobilise more fully the human potential in African communities represented by women, to whom it still denied full membership, and by the ordinary worker. On the one hand, this reflected its inability to develop strong, vibrant, self-sustaining branches, something that only really occurred first under Xuma in the 1940s, and then in the 1950s. By then there was much better use of social and political avenues to raise funds, spread awareness of Congress policies and, with the defiance campaigns and the M-Plan of Nelson Mandela, to forge close-knit cells or networks based on localities. On the other hand, weak national leadership, regional divisions, and the determined pressure of big business and the state to push leaders away from militancy also played their part in limiting ANC popular growth.

However, at the regional and local levels, and even among some national leaders, issues of nation and class strongly influenced ANC debates and policies to the extent that labour concerns, mediated by common African national interests and articulated in specific places, appear regularly in Congress circles during these years. Indeed, throughout most of the twentieth century, the difficulties posed for all social strata of Africans by the oppressive features of South African society pushed them together, helping to transcend a degree of class stratification, without ever masking class tensions entirely.

We may say the same of geographic differences. Despite marked regional variations and urban-rural divides that I have explored in this book, the basic contradiction between white rule and black national oppression provided an impetus toward a latent supra-class unity of the ANC and organised workers. The relationship was neither smooth, nor simple.