J. S. MOROKA

At the conference that December [1949], we in the Youth League knew we had the votes to depose Dr. Xuma. As an aternative candidate, we sponsored Dr. J. S. Moroka for the presidency. He was not our first choice. Professor Z. K. Matthews was the man we wanted to lead us, but Z. K. considered us too radical and our plan of action too impractical. He called us naïve firebrands, adding that we would mellow with age. Dr. Moroka was an unlikely choice. He was a member of the All-African Convention (AAC), which was dominated by Trotskyite elements at that time. When he agreed to stand against Dr. Xuma, the Youth League then enrolled him as a member of the ANC. When we first approached him, he consistently referred to the ANC as the African National 'Council'. He was not very knowledgeable about the ANC nor was he an experienced activist, but he was respectable, and amenable to our program. Like Dr. Xuma, he was a doctor, and one of the wealthiest black men in South Africa. He had studied at Edinburgh and Vienna. His great-grandfather had been a chief in the Orange Free State, and had greeted the Afrikaner voortrekkers ,of the nineteenth century with open arms and gifts of land, and then been betrayed. Dr. Xuma was defeated and Dr. Moroka became president-general of the ANC. Walter Sisulu was elected the new secretary-general, and Oliver Tambo was elected to the National Executive Committee.

-Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom (1995), p.114-5.