The Lusaka Years: the ANC in exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994 by Hugh Macmillan (review)

Hugh Macmillan’s The Lusaka Years is the first serious study of the ANC in exile in what was possibly its most important host country over a period of more than thirty years: Zambia. It was in Lusaka that the headquarters of the external mission of the ANC were located for most of the exile years and it was to the Zambian capital that a succession of delegations from South Africa travelled to speak to the ANC in the second half of the 1980s – a sign of its by then de facto recognition as the legitimate representative of the majority of South Africans both internally and internationally. Based on extensive research in South African and Zambian archives as well as interviews with key participants and the author’s personal knowledge of the ANC in Zambia and Swaziland, where he lived, this book is also one of the most comprehensive scholarly accounts of the history of the ANC in this period in general.

Its publication comes at a time of growing disaffection with the ruling party, when the ‘malign influence of exile’ (p. 11) is sometimes too easily invoked to explain the ANC’s shortcomings in the present – a tendency that Macmillan explicitly wants to counter (p. 8). The present climate of hostility towards the ANC has also given new traction to an old thesis around the alleged communist control of the ANC among its critics. The apartheid government used this argument to retain the strategic support of Western powers in the context of the Cold War, and Stephen Ellis has since continued to champion it in his books Comrades Against Apartheid (1992) and the more recent and expanded External Mission (2012).

While acknowledging many of the problems and weaknesses of the ANC in exile, Macmillan draws a rather more complex picture of the nature of ANC–SACP relations, of the overall significance of exile, and of the Zambian experience in particular. The book seeks to understand the conditions of great difficulty (not just from a strategic and logistical point of view but also in human terms, including the feelings of displacement, pain and trauma that exiles experienced) that exile created and how the ANC sought to overcome these obstacles – and the brutality of the apartheid regime – while remaining focused on the key objective of defeating apartheid and establishing a non-racial, democratic society.

While the first and last chapters serve as an introduction to the key arguments and as a conclusion, the remaining chapters unfold chronologically, beginning with the early 1960s flow of recruits to the north via the ‘pipeline’ (as the route into exile via Botswana and Zambia to reach Tanzania came to be known) following the banning of the ANC and the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) jointly with the SACP. During this period, ‘there was a temporary blurring of the boundaries between the two organisations, which were driven into closer cooperation in conditions of illegality’ (p. 16). The first attempts at finding a way home through the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns are documented, and so is their aftermath, leading to the growing crisis within MK that was one of the catalysts for the Morogoro Conference and the opening of ANC membership to non-Africans in 1969. The book does not claim that the ANC was in any way responsible for the Soweto uprising – or, for that matter, for the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the next decade. But it does show how, contrary to what have become widely held views in academic circles and elsewhere, by June 1976 (and afterwards) the ANC in exile was ‘reasonably well informed about developments inside South Africa’ (p. 112). All of the major crises that the ANC faced over the exile period are analysed in detail, from the Hani Memorandum, to the ‘Shishita’ crisis (a forerunner of the...