The black African of 100 years ago faced massive and seemingly insurmountable problems.

All across the continent, colonialism was tightening its grip. The plunder and exploitation of the continent's resources was at its most rampant.

Wars broke out over the continent's wealth. In those wars, as in the Anglo-Boer War, black Africans were either support staff in the fight over resources, or were mere fodder used by one side or the other.

The black Africans were a disorganised mess. Chief among their troubles was tribalism, a scourge that allowed their colonial conquerors to retain their control through exploiting these divisions. Here at home ominous clouds were gathering. The first real official plunder of lands belonging to blacks was being debated: when the 1913 Native Land Acts were promulgated, blacks could not buy land in the Transvaal.

Yet, black Africans were consumed by tribal divisions, and there was no united opposition to these looming threats in the 1900s.

Crucially, there was no leader prepared to walk away from the petty tribal divisions of the time and strike a new, higher, path for black Africans.

Then, in these troubled times, along came a young man called Pixley kaIsaka Seme.

Born in KwaZulu-Natal in 1881, Seme was assisted by missionaries to travel to the United States where he obtained a bachelor of arts degree in 1906. Seme then went up to Jesus College, Oxford, in England where he obtained a degree in civil law in 1909.

It was in 1906, upon his graduation from Columbia, that Seme delivered the famous speech that was the genesis of the African National Congress. For Seme it was clear that Africans in general, and black South Africans in particular, were going nowhere so long as they remained mired in tribal divisions.

Unity of the Africans was pivotal if there were to be a coherent response to the colonialist onslaught on the continent.

In the speech, delivered when he was only 25, Seme said: "The African people, although not a strictly homogeneous race, possess a common fundamental sentiment which is everywhere manifest, crystallising itself into one common controlling idea. Conflicts and strife are rapidly disappearing before a unifying force of enlightened understanding of the true intertribal relation, which relation should subsist among a people with a common destiny."

Seme, on his return to South Africa, began to organise a conference of all the tribes of South Africa to meet and form a united organisation to fight for black rights. It was an organisation that sought to break with tribal divisions and strike a bold, new and united path. On January 8 1912 the SA Native National Congress was born. It changed its name to African National Congress in 1923.

The Seme story is instructive for ANC leaders today. Seme could have returned to South Africa at the time as one of the most educated, if not the most educated, black South African, and been a celebrated Zulu man of letters.

This was the leadership web that all tribal, church and civil leaders were caught up in. They were Zulus or Tswanas or Pedis before they were black South Africans.

They fought for their corner, forgetting that other tribes faced similar challenges.

Seme rose above all these narrow Zulu and Xhosa and Pedi templates and said something new: that something beyond the rut they were stuck in was needed.

He called for all leaders to come together.

Although, at the time, he was the foremost organiser of the Bloemfontein conference - and a recognised intellectual giant - Seme did not fight to be the leader of this new organisation.

Instead, he nominated his mentor, John Langalibalele Dube (who was not at the conference), to lead.

These are two key leadership lessons for the ANC today. The party's leaders today are falling over themselves to be either supporters of President Jacob Zuma or Julius Malema (who seemingly represents the Kgalema Motlanthe bid for the ANC presidency).

Both leadership options are intellectually impoverished and morally flawed. They are not the best of the ANC.

Indeed, students of ANC history could justifiably say there have never been such poor leadership structures as there are today.

So where is the leader who can say he or she refuses to be a Zuma acolyte or a Malema stooge? Where is the leader who can say that, in its 100th year, the party needs a new way of doing things and a new type of leadership, different from that of the past seven years? Where is a Seme, a leader who does not want to do things in the same old way?

In the absence of such a leader, where are the ANC members who will raise their hands and say: "We do not want a Zuma and we do not want a Malema, or indeed their bankrupt type of leadership"?

All great organisations go through leadership crises. It is the ability of the members of such organisations to find a third way, a way out of the rut, a way to survive. Can the ANC do it? Seemingly not.