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This review is of: External Mission - The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990 (Hardcover), 2012, Hurst & Co, Ldn. ISBN 978-1-84904-262-8
As Stephen Ellis mentions in the final chapter, this particular work revises and deepens our understanding of the ANC-SACP in the important years from 1960 to 1990, extending the analysis of the earlier work "Comrades Against Apartheid - The ANC and the SACP in Exile", published first in London, in 1992. This has been made possible by extensive archival research due to the partial opening-up the Stasi (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheid - MFS) archives and secret files in the ex-GDR, and in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Bellville, Bloemfontein, Ghana, Botswana and Oxford, London and interviews of activists recalling their involvement in either of these organisations.
His chronology is important as he highlights some "turning points" in the evolution of the African National Congress {ANC} from a loosely centralised over-ground and legal organisation in the period around the Sharpville events of 1960, to its banning and move to underground activities by 1963 with the Rivonia Trial and the "M-Plan". As the link with the South African Communist Party became increasingly important after the mid_60s, the question of democratic centralization, the logistics of waging an armed insurrection became primary as the Party-Movement turned increasingly to Moscow and the Eastern Bloc countries for material supplies and training and China and Cuba as an inspiration for a "model" of a successfull guerilla struggle. Military training camps were first set up in Nyerere s Tanzania in the mid-60s.
The first time ANC soldiers of MK took part in a large-scale operation was in the ill-fated Wankie operation of 1967. Ellis throws new light on our understanding of these events. The changes in the internal structures and their evolution is the focus of much of this period as the ANC became a monolithic, "un-democratic centralist", pro-Soviet line dependency with its top cadre secret SACP members!
The establishment of a London center and the involvement of key ANC-SACP activists in the formation and operation of the Anti-Apartheid Movement(AAM) was also senimal to the exile years and key moments in the functioning of the AMM is highlighted. But it was the Morogorro Consultative Conference in Tanzania of 1969 that was to consolidate the hold the SACP over the ANC through its secretive manner of "Leninist organisational" theory and practice, so that the ANC and the SACP became intertwined, while the "Africanist" outer-shell remained as a PR exercise to fool and confuse their many supporters.
The rest is HISTORY .... after 1976 the township youth fled the country and were to become the new recruits in the geurilla operations of the movement that was ill-equiped to handle the flood of militant and angry youngsters. Ellis does a good job in decribing the creating of a new-look MK after 1976. The state of almost permanent urban insurrection since 1976 to mid-1980s is not described by Ellis but forms the backdrop to the unfolding saga.
But it is above all in the formation of trhe "Security and Information" Department (NAD) and the Mkokobo "the grinding stone" where he covers the familiar ground first published in Searchlight South Africa in 1989 and the work of Paul Trewhela now gathered together in the volume "Inside Quarto - uncovering the hidden exile history of the anc and swapo", Jacana Media, Johannesburg, 2001. Like Trewhela, Ellis puts forward the idea that the South African military, Department of Military Intelligence (DMI), the State Security (CCB) under P.W.Botha and Pieter van den Burg had undergone fundamental changes, the end result being the creating of murderous hit and murder squads that operated without checks and balances and the increasing nefarious activities of unaccountable operatives who simply pocketed the money as they were accountable to no one. Corruption became endemic in both camps and this culture of criminality was one of the prime evil results of this process.
The South Africa emerging after 1994 still suffers from this cancerous growth in its body politic, in its vital organs and in its methods of civic representation. *
In fact, a similar process of undemocratic and repressive top-down chain of command came to operate in the ANC-MK, especially after the mass opposition of the MK soldiers in Northern camps of Viana, Pango etc during the Matshankiso(MK Revolt), which Ellis correctly calls a "PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT". An estimated 90% of MK troops were involved.
The end result, in my opinion, is not fully dissected by Ellis: the role of Thabo Machiavelli Mbeki, the heir-apparent, in Dacar and Lusaka by 1985 is never fully teased out. The covert, secret DEALS that were hammered out in Lusaka, London and the tacit acceptance of a transition of Majority Rule, release of political prisoners etc ends the period. Both the ANC and its counterparts in the military intelligence grew closer and intertwined to become a single corrupt monstrosity that used every means to cover its tracks while seeking new areas of financial operation.
Interestingly, Ellis throws new light on the MYTHOLOGY of the ANC-SACP and its historic falsification of history - the "memoricide" (erasure of all traces of a proper history) that is all to apparent in our youth today. What really brought about "The End of Apartheid?" will be the subject of much further research and proper investigation. Was it the fact that the Chase Manhattan Bank refused to roll-over further loans at a crucial moment in 1985, thus signalling a cumulative "loss of confidence" in the almost bankrupt apartheid state, the effects of crippling oil sanctions, the loss of air superiority at the Battle of Cuito Cuanivale in Southern Angola, the "Gorbachev Turn" from the 1980s and the summation or ending of all armed struggles by its dependent sutraps and clients in the Third World. The fact that the ANC was crippled from within after the Mkatashinga p.186 passim) and the Pro Democracy Movement in the ANC-MK was put down in blood leading to further demoralization of the troops and the ability of the bureaucrats to embark of "secret deals" with the devil in Pretoria and elsewhere. My own feeling is that it was a combination of the above factors, but the specific weight of each has to be researched further,
I enjoyed reading this important work, in two-three days of intense study and will now go back and re-read important sections of this work and cross-check with other materials and research I have assembled.
..................
* R.W. Johnston has written - "The modern ANC is essentially a rural party. The biggest delegations at its December 2012 conference will come from the rural heartlands -- the KwaZulu- Natal, Eastern Cape and Limpopo provinces. Gauteng is South Africa's most populous and urban province and home to the economic capital of Johannesburg. But it is only the ANC's fourth-biggest province by membership, coming just ahead of rural Mpumalanga.
Even in 1994 it was evident that the racial cleavage in electoral politics was weakest in Gauteng, where the bulk of the black middle class lives. Gauteng has become the centre of opposition to Jacob Zuma's leadership. The ANC is more at home in the Zululand idyll of Nkandla, where Mr Zuma can happily herd his cattle and pamper his wives in the fashion of a Zulu chief, than in the bustle of modern, dynamic Johannesburg...
South Africa is a country of five big cities: what happens there determines its future ...South Africa's racial fault-lines are so strong that it is difficult for civil society or political parties to ignore them. Either such institutions fail to achieve coherence or tip the scales towards one group. The ANC set out to be that sort of catch-all party, to assemble a completely multi-racial constituency. It failed in large part because its "Africanist" elements alienated the minorities. " [...]
Also, there is another element that makes the water murky, the very fact that Parliament as it is now structured is a HUNG PARLIAMENT: MP when elected DO NOT REPRESENT CONSTITUENCIES BUT ARE SUBORDINATED TO THE PARTY WHIP {i.e. there is NO REAL DEMOCRACY - even if elections have the facade of being "democratic"!).
Paul Trewhela writes: " The Electoral Law at the birth of democracy in South Africa in 1994 created also the death of democracy, because it disempowered the people from individual choice of their representatives through exclusion of any role for constituencies in elections at national, provincial and 50 percent municipal level. The Electoral Law created corporatist government, since voters lack the power of decision to hold each elected representative to account. Since they can only vote for the party-list, instead of a free choice of the individual who is to be elected, the people are required to vote also for their own disenfranchisement.
Top-down government was fatally built into South African democracy at all levels with this exclusion of constituency accountability from the Electoral Law. It turned the National Assembly into a rubber stamp, with similar consequences in eight of the nine provinces and in the great majority of municipalities." [...]
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