No Easy Walk to Freedom

The African National Congress is a social-democratic political organization formed in South Africa in 1912. The organization formed to agitate peacefully for the rights of Black South Africans, but following the Nationalist government’s rise to power in 1948, it shifted to a strategy of mass mobilization and civil disobedience. The Nationalist government banned the ANC in 1960, so the organization went underground and continued carrying out its plan of noncooperation with the support of other domestic and international political organizations fighting for the eradication of racist policies and the establishment of democratic government. Mandela joined the ANC in 1944, and throughout the book’s essays, letters, and speeches, he articulates the ANC’s principles, goals, and strategies. The ANC currently governs the country of South Africa, with Mandela becoming their first elected president in 1994.

In Chapter 5, Mandela defines baasskap as a policy of white overlordship “based on the supremacy in all matters of the Whites over the non-Whites” (31). He identifies baasskap as the policy of the apartheid government in his argument aligning the fascist Nationalist government with the policies of Hitlerite Germany.