Debating the ANC’s external links during the struggle against Apartheid

Several recent publications have explored the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) external links during South Africa’s apartheid years. The following four texts offer an insight into the very different personal and methodological approaches that have so far shaped attempts to understand this aspect of the ANC’s struggle. The section starts with a review of Stephen Ellis’s recent book External Mission: the ANC in exile, 1960–1990 by Hugh Macmillan, who argues that Ellis overemphasizes the relationship between the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP). In a response to this review, Stephen Ellis justifies his approach by pointing to the importance of interpretation for the production of history, but also by referring to the different networks and resources, both in South Africa and beyond, on which he and Macmillan were able to draw. A review of Hugh Macmillan’s new book The Lusaka Years: the ANC in exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994 by Arianna Lissoni follows. Lissoni agrees with the author that the debate about the ANC in exile must be understood in the context of contemporary disaffection with South Africa’s ruling party. Emphasizing the specificity of the Zambian experience, she welcomes Macmillan’s focus on the multiplicity of experiences in exile as potentially opening new avenues for further study and reflection on the ANC. Finally, Mariya Kurbak’s consideration of Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson’s The Hidden Thread: Russia and South Africa in the Soviet era explains that the authors’ close understanding of Russian–South African relations enables them to illuminate the previously hidden importance of the Soviet Union in the history of South Africa and the ANC.

I should, perhaps, begin by declaring an interest. I have recently published a book, The Lusaka Years: the ANC in exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994, which, though different in its focus, may be seen as being in competition with this book. Stephen Ellis’s book is a rewrite of an earlier book, Comrades Against Apartheid: the ANC and the South African Communist Party in exile, which he wrote with Tsepo Sechaba (the pen name of Oyama Mabandla) and published in 1992. That was the first book to expose some of the worst incidents in the exile history of the ANC, the mutinies in Angola in 1984 and their suppression by the Angolan military and the ANC’s own security department, referred to in that book and in this one as Mbokodo – the grinding stone. The original book emerged out of Ellis’s role as editor of Africa Confidential and drew on the personal experience and knowledge of his informant, Sechaba/Mabandla. The new book cites an impressive array of archival sources including the ANC archives and Tambo papers at the University of Fort Hare, the ANC papers at the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape, and the Simons papers at the University of Cape Town. Ellis has had access to some of the files of the East German security service, the Stasi. He also had access to some State Security Council files while working as a researcher for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995 and has used some information from confidential sources, including transcripts of radio messages sent between Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) commanders during the Angolan mutinies. His account of these mutinies remains the best available, although a different picture may emerge when MK and ANC security files become available and work is done on the relevant Angolan government and military archives, assuming that they have survived.

External Mission is a much better documented book than Comrades Against Apartheid, but it is, like its predecessor, a polemical work that appears to be driven, as reviewers of the earlier book noted, by a conspiracy theory of history and ‘an indecent obsession’ (Garth Strachan, ‘Indecent obsession’, work in progress, September 1992) with the role of the SACP. In a ‘Note on Method’, Ellis states that he has ‘tried...