All-African Convention

The AAC, formed in 1936, was an umbrella organisation for corporate groups. For a while the African National Congress belonged but withdrew after disputes within the AAC leadership. In 1944 the recently-formed (Coloured) Non-European Unity Movement became affiliated, and in its public pronouncements the AAC was increasingly radical; but its membership remained mainly middle-class professional people, especially teachers, in Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town. It opposed Bantu Education in the 1950's but was scarcely activist. Its only rural support lay in the Southern Transkei where it actively opposed land rehabilitation measures and the Bantu authorities. By the 1960s it had developed a peasant-based strategy (in contrast to the urban-oriented ANC). It survives today in exile, as the African Peoples' Democratic Union of South Africa, but it has no international status comparable to those of the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress.