I was a friend of the late Samir Amin – we met a number of times in our long and peripatetic lives and never without personal warmth and delight at the shared opportunity to compare and contrast our opinions and to further discuss them. 

The real question worth arguing about soberly is: Does the ANC (or the SACP for that matter) have the capacity to right itself and become a real instrument of genuine liberation of the South African people in the post-apartheid period?

Despite its brave history of a hundred years, the ANC is ineluctably becoming yesterday's movement. Fortunately, politics in South Africa has long been about more than the ANC – and so it will be again.

Fifty years on from the beginnings of liberation in Africa, John S. Saul finds there is still much work to be done, especially in southern Africa where the final triumph over colonial and racial domination occurred. In each of the five sites of the overt struggle against domination – Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa – there are clear signs of recolonisation, this time by capital.