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This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

Morogoro

A number of key policy matters were addressed by the ANC* at its third consultative conference (the first two were at Pietermaritzburg and Lobatsi) held at Morogoro, Tanzania in 1969. The conference was attended by about 70 delegates drawn from the ANC and its alliance partners. One of the main issues discussed was that Indians, whites and Coloureds, members of the SACP,* South African Indian Congress* (SAIC), Coloured People's Congress (CPC) and Congress of Democrats* (SACOD), although they had been working closely with the ANC leadership since the 1950s as part of the Congress Alliance,* were not permitted to join the ANC. Many of these committed activists had been closely involved with MK and wanted their relationship with the ANC to be on a more formal footing, but there was some division within the ANC on this. At the conference it was decided that non-Africans would henceforth be permitted to join the external ANC on the basis of individual equality, but could not belong to the ANC's national executive. Several members of the previously marginalized group, including Yusuf Dadoo and Joe Slovo not only joined the ANC but became members of its Revolutionary Council. A second policy issue addressed at Morogoro in 1969 was the adoption of a revolutionary programme, an elaboration of the major clauses of the Freedom Charter, particularly those dealing with the land issue, the curbing of rights of racial minorities, and the preservation of a form of welfare state capitalism. This latter was evidence that the SACP influence in the ANC was not as pervasive as thought by some. At Morogoro, then, the external ANC was noticeably conservative and still essentially nationalist in character.

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