The 52nd National Conference of the African National Congress (ANC) was held in Polokwane, Limpopo from 16 December – 20 December 2007. It elected Jacob Zuma and supporters to the party's top leadership and National Executive Committee (NEC), representing a significant defeat for Thabo Mbeki, then the party's incumbent president and president of the country.
The conference was significant as a precursor to the general election of 2009, in which the newly-elected leader of the ANC, the current majority party in the national parliament, is highly likely to become the next President of South Africa. (Thabo Mbeki resigned on 20 September 2008 and was replaced by Kgalema Motlanthe on 25 September 2008.) It was also the first leadership contest between two candidates at the national level since the 38th National Conference of the African National Congress in 1949, a watershed moment in the party's history when the moderate leadership was displaced by such figures as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu.
Read more about 52nd National Conference Of The African National Congress: Buildup, New Party Leadership
Famous quotes containing the words national, conference, african and/or congress:
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football’s place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“There is not a subject in which I take a deeper interest than I do in the development of Alaska, and I propose, if Congress will follow by recommendations, to do something in that territory that will make it move on.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)