[6] Although on the left wing of the ANC, Xuma was seen during his leadership as too conservative by an increasingly impatient and activist youth, which he regarded in turn with suspicion.
[7] Nevertheless, it was under his leadership, albeit after having been very cannily lobbied, and in spite of warnings from his colleagues that it would lead to his downfall, that the ANC in 1942 established its Youth League.
[8] A young Nelson Mandela was among the activists present (including Walter Sisulu, Congress Mbata, and William Nkomo)[9] who in 1944 visited his home in Sophiatown to agitate for his acceptance of the league's manifesto and draft constitution.
To Mandela, however, and many other young Africans of the time, he represented the old way of doing things: deputations, statements, committees—gentlemen politics in the British tradition.
[8]Xuma responded very angrily and sarcastically after reading what he called their "high-learned" manifesto, which explicitly criticized the ANC's failure to advance the national cause, as well as its deficiencies in organisation and constitution, and its "erratic policy of yielding to oppression, regarding itself as a body of gentlemen with clean hands."