Does this sound familiar?

“The African National Congress was more intent on celebrating its anniversary than addressing serious issues.” The organisation, led by a president who regularly demonstrated an inability to control his own financial affairs, “suffered from graft” and was “ineffective” in addressing the true needs of the people it claimed to represent. On the occasion of its anniversary, speakers took a “defensive line at the outset”; the “whole tone” of the event was one of “looking back to past achievements”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a description of the ANC at the start of 2012. Indeed, numerous commentators have criticised the party’s centenary celebration for a partial account of the organisation’s role as liberator-in-chief and for selective presentation of its record as a ruling party. They have observed that this exercise in self-congratulation was designed, firstly, to distract South Africans from the many failings of the current ANC; and, secondly, to continue the revisionism by which distinct anti-apartheid movements and individuals are slowly being erased from both formal and informal national histories.