The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (logo)
*The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania was formed on this date in 1959. Often shortened to the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), it is a South African pan-Africanist national liberation movement that has evolved into a political party.
It was founded by an Africanist group, led by Robert Sobukwe, that broke away from the African National Congress (ANC) in 1959, as the PAC objected to the ANC's theory that "the land belongs to all who live in it both white and black" and also rejected a multiracialize worldview, instead advocating a South Africa based on African nationalism. On March 21, 1960, the PAC organized a campaign against pass laws. People gathered in the townships of Sharpeville and Langa, where Sobukwe and other top leaders were arrested and later convicted for incitement. Sobukwe was sentenced to three years in prison, and Potlako Leballo to two years.
The PAC was formally launched at Orlando Community Hall in Soweto. Several ANC members broke away because they objected to the substitution of the 1949 Program of Action with the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955, which used multiracialist language as opposed to Africanist affirmations. The PAC at the time considered South Africa to be an African state by an "inalienable right of the indigenous African people" and refused to support equal rights of the oppressed and oppressor, exploiter and exploited, the land dispossessor and landless Africans - "the dispossessed." They insisted that the historic mission of the PAC was "the complete freedom, liberation and independence of Afrika."
This entailed political, social, economic, and military independence. Robert Sobukwe was elected as the first president, and Potlako Leballo as Secretary-General. Sobukwe died in Kimberley, Cape Province, in 1978 of lung cancer. Immediately after the Sharpeville massacre, the National Party Government banned both the ANC and PAC on April 8, 1960. The PAC responded by founding its armed wing, the Azanian People's Liberation Army.
The PAC has been plagued by infighting and has undergone numerous leadership changes since transitioning to a political party. Infighting continued after the 2019 elections, with leader Narius Moloto unilaterally dissolving the party's structures, a decision which the courts later set aside. In October 2019, the Independent Electoral Commission recognized Mzwanele Nyhontso as the legitimate party leader. In 2024, Nyhontso joined the Government of National Unity as Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development following the ANC's loss of its majority in Parliament.
