the ANC adopted a statement, Africans' ClaimsinSouth Africa, which cited
the Atlantic Charter and set out a bill of rights calling for the abolition of all
discriminatory legislation, redistribution of the land, African participation
in collective bargaining, and universal adult suffrage. That year a group of
young professional Africans founded a youth league as a pressure group in
the ANC, stressing the need for African self-reliance and unity. Graduates of
the best missionary high schools in South Africa and of the Native College
at Fort Hare, they included Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter
Sisulu. In 1945 and 1947, ANC delegates attended pan-African meetings in
Manchester, England, and Dakar, Senegal, where they met such African
nationalists as Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal,Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya,
and Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast (Ghana), who would soon be-
come rulers of independent states. Nevertheless, in 1948 the ANC still
had fewer than six thousand members, and it had no fully developed
plan of action when white South Africans went to the polls in a general
election."!
Bythat time, the Smuts government had finally lost the confidence of the
older Africans who controlled the Natives Representative Council, created