Spear of the Nation: Umkhonto weSizwe

1. Introduction

9 1 Introduction Hailed as heroes by many SouthAfricans,demonised as evil terrorists by others, Umkhonto weSizwe, the Spear of the Nation, is now part of history. Though theorganisationnolongerexists,itsformermembers are represented by the mK military veterans’ Association, which still carries some political clout within the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The story of mK, as Umkhonto is widely and colloquiallyknowninSouthAfrica,isoneof paradox and contradiction, successes and failures. A people’s army fighting a people’s war of national liberation, they never got to march triumphant into Pretoria. A small group of dedicated revolutionaries trained by the Soviet Union and its allies, they were committed to the seizure of state power, but instead found their principals engaged in negotiated settlement with the enemy as the winds of global politics shifted in 10 the late 1980s. A guerrilla army of a few thousand soldiers in exile, disciplined and well trained, many of them were never deployed in battle, and most could not ‘get home’ to engage the enemy. Though mK soldiers set off limpet mines in public places in South Africa, killing a number of innocent civilians, they refrained from laying the anti-personnel mines that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands in other late-twentieth-century wars. They acted with remarkable restraint, and in doing so prevented a bloody race war from engulfing South Africa in the 1980s; yet they were accused of fostering a climate of insurrectionary violence in which nearly a thousand people were ‘necklaced’, and thousands more were shot, stabbed or hacked to death in violence involving civilians. mK was arguably the last of the great liberation armies of the twentieth century – the freedom fighters who fought for independence from colonial, authoritarian or imperialist rule, in vietnam and Bolivia, Guinea-Bissau and Nicaragua. In terms of international humanitarian law, the armed struggle that mK fought was a just war. At the same time, it was also one of the final conflicts of the Cold War era. mK’s ideology, strategy and tactics acquired 11 shape and took purchase within the great contest of the second half of the twentieth century between capitalism and socialism, between the West and the Communist bloc. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War coincided with,and was a causal factor in, the end of mK’s armed struggle and the negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa. This book provides a brief history of mK, of which there are conflicting views and analyses. It does not present a detailed chronological account of every mK action but outlines the different strategic phases in its 30-odd-year history. It also illustrates these phases with stories drawn from the experiences of mK members. Some are taken from interviews conducted for the South African Democracy education Trust project. I am indebted to SADeT, who is the copyright-holder, for the opportunity to conduct some of these interviews and for access to others. Other stories are drawn from testimony to the Truth and reconciliation Commission, whose records are in the public domain. There is some bias in the selection of illustrative material, mainly geographicinnature:Ihavebeenlivingintheeastern Cape for over 25 years, and many of the stories and 12 accounts come from this area. There is also a bias in the framing of the book, stemming from my own involvement as an ANC and an anti-war activist during the 1980s; but I hope that this experience has enhanced my understanding of mK. I want to write a popular account which is both a critical, anti-war history and a history that is profoundly empathetic to the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting for a just cause. ...