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THE biggest mistake the African National Congress made in its 96-year history was to swallow up the United Democratic Front in 1990 and to then get rid of its political culture.

Many an ANC leader who had spent his and her adult years mainly in exile has told me over the years that I romanticise the UDF, that I overestimate its impact or that it was a purely ANC body anyway. They are wrong on all counts.

The formation of the UDF more or less coincided with my own political awakening. I came from a conservative Afrikaner nationalist home, attended a conservative Afrikaner nationalist university and then went to work for a conservative Afrikaner nationalist newspaper.

By 1983, I had witnessed the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in our region, the uprisings in Soweto and other townships, the killing of Steve Biko and the SADF's wars in Namibia, Angola and other frontline states. I knew by then apartheid and minority rule were evil, dangerous and unsustainable.

But I was part of the white, privileged, authoritarian, chauvinist, racist Afrikaner establishment. I felt threatened by black people. So how does one break out of that and find a new political home? Well, I looked around and the only democrats I could find who seemed to want someone like me and had a vision for the future I could believe in were the UDF – people like Allan Boesak, Azhar Cachalia, Christmas Tinto, Murphy Morobe, Terror Lekota, Johnny Issel, Andrew Boraine, Trevor Manuel, Sydney Mufamadi, Cheryl Carolus, Valli Moosa, Frank Chikane and Desmond Tutu.

The UDF consisted of Christians, Muslims, Jews, communists, trade unionists, entrepreneurs, socialists, social democrats, intellectuals and workers, men and women from the cities and the deep rural areas, from every region of our country. What kept them together was their dream of freedom, dignity, democracy and justice. If you believed that apartheid should end and be replaced by a fair system where the race, ethnicity or gender of citizens did not determine their standing in society, you were welcome.

The UDF didn’t only preach non-racialism, it lived it. It was not an ideological position as much as it was an integral part of the political culture of the movement. And through the seven years of its existence, the UDF brought more South Africans of the minority groupings into mainstream politics than the ANC did in nine decades.

It took me and made me part of the struggle, and thousands of people like me who would otherwise have remained part of the system. (Isn’t it just ironic that a national movement looking after the interests of coloured people, the Bruin Belange Inisiatief, was formed in the same month as the 25th anniversary of the UDF two years ago, also in Cape Town, with many former UDF activists involved?)

Instead of building on that culture of non- racialism we are now back to racial classifications and racial head counts. Blatant racial insults have become part of the normal discourse. We have a silly young rabble-rouser pontificating in 2009 that the liberation struggle was about freeing “blacks in general and Africans in particular” and complaining that “minorities” dominated certain sectors of government.

Our political parties remain divided along racial lines. We have a dangerous racial schism in our judiciary. A national sports body criminally neglects to look after one of its own stars and then blames it on white racists. Etcetera.

The other distinctive part of the UDF political culture was difficult and cumbersome, but equally important: accountability. It led only with the mandate of the members of the movement. It consulted constituencies and member organisations on even unimportant issues.

The ANC in exile had a very different culture. Because it was a banned movement inside the country, because it waged an armed struggle against the regime and because that regime did everything in its power to infiltrate it, it had to be more secretive with a more centralised leadership. Unfortunately this led to authoritarianism, elitism, abuse of power and disrespect of the human rights and dignity of its own cadres.

When it became clear to the business community and agents of change in the white community by the mid-1980s that a negotiated settlement was urgent and was the only way out, they fell for the ANC's propaganda that it was the sole representative of the people of South Africa. They started talks with the ANC in Lusaka, Dakar and elsewhere. They didn’t realise then that the most obvious and important grouping they had to start talking to first, or at least at the same time, was the UDF and Cosatu. I was one of those who trekked to Dakar in 1987 to break the taboo on talks with the exiled ANC.

The apartheid regime followed the same route. At least they had an excuse: their first steps towards negotiations with the majority started with meetings with Nelson Mandela in jail, and he recognised only the ANC in exile as the leaders of the liberation movement. He insisted on direct talks between the government and the ANC in exile; he never asked them to meet the leaders of the resistance who fought hardest for his release.

Looking back over the past 25 years, it is now even clearer that it was the internal resistance and not the armed struggle or the propaganda out of Luanda or Lusaka that forced the apartheid machinery to the negotiating table. Those who are writing our history will record, if they’re honest, that Umkhonto weSizwe was little more than a symbolic force and could never constitute a significant military threat to the Pretoria regime.

This glorification of the external leadership of the democratic movement made the ANC in exile even more arrogant. And when they returned after the unbanning of 1990, they simply gobbled up the UDF and all its structures and then spat out its political culture. The loyal and disciplined comrades of the UDF allowed it, because most of them always believed that they were always comrades in the same struggle and movement.

Boesak writes in his autobiography, Running with Horses, that the issues on the table in 1990 weren’t the problem. “It was the approach, the underlying, foundational arguments, the style that was so very different, almost disorientating, for me at least. The values we had held so dear and on which we had built our struggle, the ideals in which we believed, the dreams which shaped our actions, the faith that gave content to our hopes and sacrifices – all these were as nothing here.”

I think if we had not killed off the UDF and its ideals and political culture we would never have had a Thabo Mbeki and his cronies abusing their power and alienating their constituency; we would not have had a government and a civil service abandoning the poor and the working class; we would have made sure that black economic empowerment benefited the masses instead of a few chosen ones; we would not have tolerated the development of personality cults; we would not have had the minority groups drifting away from the mainstream and becoming more and more reactionary; we would have made the education of our children and the health of our people top priorities.

There would have been no room for a Jacob Zuma or a Julius Malema in our political culture if we had built on the traditions of the UDF.

The UDF was a true people’s movement. The post-1994 ANC is not.

This is an edited extract from the revised and updated edition of Max du Preez’s Pale Native – Memories of a Renegade Reporter that is due out later this year. Du Preez is an author, political analyst and former newspaper editor