ANC founders’ missionary and US education shaped their pluralist politics

Evidence

Both emerged out of the religious formation of their founders. For the Broederbond leaders this was the anticipatory messianism of a self-directed state by, for, and limited to members of the volk, Afrikaners above all and whites more broadly. For the ANC forefathers like John Langalibalele Dube and his cousin Pixley Seme, their missionary education was as formative as their later education in the US and Britain and their influence by Booker T. Washington, most notably under the civilizing guidance of the American Zion mission. Where the Broederbond was always uni-representational, ethno-nationalistic, segregationist, racially restrictive, and inward-looking, the ANC came quickly to be pluralist, multi-racial, coalitional, integrationist, and internationalist. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1535

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the diaspora-education pipeline theme; also connects to Things Fall Apart’s depiction of missionary education’s colonial ambivalence among Africans.