THE African National Congress richly deserves to be congratulated on its 100th anniversary.

The role the organisation has played in our liberation is common cause. The challenge it faces now is of a different nature: how to tell its story, interestingly and credibly.

The difficulty is that while the organisation is the custodian of its own history, it is not the custodian of the attention span of those to whom it seeks to communicate that history.

Some of them were born long after some of the events it seeks to tell. Thus, President Jacob Zuma and his critics miss the point when they argue whether his January 8 statement in Mangaung was about the past or the future.

The real point is that, where I watched the speech, the people simply switched off the television and put on the music.

History is important, but it must be told in more captivating and credible ways.

Also, by organising the celebrations around its 12 presidents, the ANC faces the additional risk of missing the forest for the trees.

The forest is the rich texture of intellectual history that inspired what Professor Ntongela Masilela has described as the New African Movement in the 19th century.

Defeated in war, African people found creative ways to respond to the imposition of a racist European modernity.

The handful of African intellectuals who studied at Lovedale College blazed the trail in adapting the very instruments of that modernity - education and religion - to advance the wellbeing of Africans.

This was done through self-help associations, newspapers and calls for direct African political representation.

By the way, contrary to the long-held view that the Rev Tiyo Soga was the pioneer in the African intellectual encounter with European modernity, Yale University's Roger Levine points out that Dyani Tshatshu - Jan Tzatzoe - preceded Soga by 50 years as an interlocutor with colonial and missionary institutions.

In 1836 Tshatshu visited London to petition against the unjust treatment of African people by the colonial authorities.

His speeches were received with rapturous applause, while the colonists back in Grahamstown were reduced to racist editorials in the Grahamstown Gazette denouncing his visit.

I suspect many young people would be more interested in listening to these historical narratives than never-ending soliloquies about the greatness of this or that leader in achieving a long line of victories unmarred by mistakes or contradictions.

While I count myself among those who have made the mistake of focusing on the virtues and vices of "great men", a new approach to the study of history and society is required.

By focusing on individual leaders, we run the risk of simply mirroring the history of "great men" in white political culture - from Jan van Riebeeck to Cecil John Rhodes to Jan Smuts, Hendrik Verwoerd and P W Botha.

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre describes his magisterial study of Napoleon as going beyond the individual to "cast light not only on the essential features of the French people ... but also on the operation of forces independent of his will".

And so, another captivating and credible narrative could bring out the complexity and contradictions of the ANC's history, including those developments that took place independent of the will of its leaders.

This could range from intra-organisational debates between conservatives and radicals within the ANC, to inter-organisational debates it had with the All African Convention, the Unity Movement, the Pan Africanist Congress and the black consciousness movement; and how those debates in turn shaped its evolving identity.

In short, as it tells its story, the ANC should be careful to keep in mind that history does not develop in a straight line.

As Immanuel Kant put it: "Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be carved."