Readers familiar with the history of armed struggle will immediately notice my emphasis on the experience of exile in this summary. Placing exile at the center of this history is crucial for contextualizing the following chapters because much of the dramatic action of the armed struggle was largely orchestrated from the backstage of exile. Although all history is comprised of multiple experiences and perspectives, the conditions of exile and nature of combat in the armed struggle exaggerated this tendency to a seemingly unworkable degree. As Mwezi Twala wrote of his experience in African National Congress (ANC) camps in the Angolan bush, “a cadre really only knew what was going on in his camp; he did not know what was going on in other camps except by word of mouth and news which was conveyed by truck drivers who brought supplies to the camps. It was frequently difficult to separate fact from fiction.”¹ Although Twala is specifically referring to camps, his observation serves as a useful metaphor for illustrating how the armed struggle was always an unstable concept and that this instability is an important part of the experiences of the people who fought within it.

In spite of this inherent instability, memoirs and histories of the armed struggle commonly make claims to some degree of comprehensiveness, while more often than not presenting a segmented understanding of this supposedly unified experience. Furthermore, these works often employ the triple conceit of telling “nothing but the truth” by revealing the “undercover struggle” from an “insider’s perspective.”² Whether marketing strategy, narrative strategy, or a combination of both, the effect of these histories is to suggest that a bedrock of experience exists and that it can be contained within a single text written by a single author. Based on my reading of these often frustratingly contradictory accounts, I argue that arriving at any “comprehensive truth” of the armed struggle is, at best, problematic, at worst, pointless. Nevertheless, there is value in placing these disparate narrative strands together—not in an attempt to cobble together some patchwork account that achieves a probable accuracy, but rather to describe the myriad ways this history was written and rewritten. Placing the historical narrative of a dogged anticommunist against that of a party stalwart while aligning both against an account written by a dissident MK guerrilla presents not only an intellectual challenge but also reveals the spaces, concealments, and silences that run through each perspective.

The broad alliances and mass protests of the 1950s should not suggest that members shared any consensus beyond the ultimate aims of the struggle and the immediate range of tactics. Instead, the political terrain between various components of the alliance was wide and varied—containing at any given time a motley assortment of Marxists, white liberals, Africanists, and black bourgeois interests, with members assuming multiple guises—sometimes simultaneously. Aside from the ANC leadership itself, communists stood as the most cohesive and disciplined faction within this fluid political environment. Outlawed as a political organization since 1950, key members of the then named Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) secretly reconstituted their organization as the South African Communist Party (SACP), a tightly organized, underground version of its predecessor.⁶ During the mass protests of the 1950s, SACP members joined a variety of organizations within the Congress Alliance, gaining a particularly disproportionate share of leadership posts within the left-leaning Congress of Democrats, as well as within the ANC itself.⁷

As the decade drew to a close, competition between various factions with the Congress Alliance intensified, as popular calls for change outstripped actual gains.⁸ In the excited atmosphere of early decolonization, demands for racial equality and democracy in South Africa became ever more urgent, with some openly articulating a political vision markedly different from that enshrined in the Freedom Charter. By 1959, this plurality became untenable, as a faction of Africanists within the ANC split with the organization over the principle of nonracialism and formed a rival organization, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).⁹ The PAC quickly questioned the degree to which the ANC and the Congress Alliance could claim to be the sole representative of the oppressed masses. In a series of strikes and protests, the PAC and the ANC each attempted to discredit the populist credentials of their rival. This situation reached a climax on March 21, 1960, when the PAC staged a hastily arranged antipass campaign ten days ahead of a similar campaign scheduled by the ANC.¹⁰ On that day, crowds gathered around a police station in Sharpeville to protest pass laws by returning their hated passbooks. Police fired on the protesters, killing sixty-nine and wounding countless others. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, an already-changing political environment accelerated beyond all expectations.

The government reacted to the Sharpeville massacre by outlawing the ANC as well as its rival, the PAC, trying the leaders of both organizations for treason, arbitrarily arresting and detaining some, while subjecting the remainder to intense surveillance and harassment. In the context of this severe disruption and violent government repression, many within the ANC began to seriously question its future as an exclusively nonviolent organization.¹¹ In the summer of 1961, the Working Committee of the ANC met to discuss the issue of violence. Leading the case for violence was Nelson Mandela, who gained notoriety as the youthful face of ANC passive resistance campaigns during the 1950s. As Mandela recalled in his autobiography, advocates of violence did not want to replace other tactics of passive resistance, so much as complement the range of possibilities available to ANC leaders. Those arguing against Mandela suggested that violence would only invite further government repression, opening the possibility of future massacres and ultimately undermining more conventional tactics. Although sources differ over which circles actually endorsed violence versus nonviolence, the executive committee eventually arrived at a compromise. The ANC itself would not accept violence as a new resolution but would create a “separate and independent organ, linked to the ANC and under the overall control of the ANC, but fundamentally autonomous.”¹²

With this momentous decision, the ANC embarked on a thirty-year intermittent armed struggle against the apartheid government. This new organization, dubbed Umkhonto we Sizwe and abbreviated as MK, also established the first sustained administrative link between the SACP and the ANC, fostering a level of cooperation greater than previously enjoyed between the two organizations.¹³ In these early years, this collaboration was far from equal. Black and white planners alike carefully managed perceptions of white communist involvement by staffing conspicuous MK positions with prominent black leaders. Behind the scenes, white communists—many veterans of the Springbok Legion that served in World War II—trained new recruits in clandestine operations and sabotage techniques.¹⁴ In the final months of 1961, a regional structure emerged, with each group securing chemicals and explosives locally, through legal channels or by theft.¹⁵

On December 16, 1961, during a public holiday commemorating the Voortrekker victory over Dingaan, bombs exploded near government offices and critical infrastructure in all major cities in South Africa. In conjunction with the bombings, leaflets and posters publicly announced the arrival of MK. This carefully orchestrated operation would be the first of dozens carried out over the next two years, all designed to minimize the possibility of “civilian” casualties, while maximizing damage to visible government symbols and disrupting economic prosperity.

Concurrent with the domestic sabotage campaign, the ANC accelerated existing plans to internationalize their organization by establishing relationships with sympathetic governments. Ghana was a likely choice, given Kwame Nkrumah’s professed Pan-Africanist commitment to the decolonization of Africa.¹⁷ Tennyson Makiwane, the first director of international affairs, established an office there as early as 1959, only to be expelled in 1961 when Nkrumah mercurially realigned himself with the PAC.¹⁸ Fortunes changed in 1962, when the Pan-African Freedom Movement for Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA) sent Mandela on a whirlwind tour of recently decolonized African states.¹⁹ Traveling to Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Ghana, Tanganyika, and Ethiopia, among other African states, Mandela, later accompanied by Joe Matthews and Oliver Tambo, received assurances of limited funding as well as permission to establish guerilla training camps. In addition, Mandela visited ANC offices in London while meeting with parliamentary opposition leaders. Despite effusive promises, PAFMECSA member nations remained fair weather allies. Akin to its indirect descendent, the Organization of African Unity Liberation Committee, the commitment of member states to Pan-African struggles against colonialism waxed and waned as diplomatic pressures mounted and internal disputes divided African nations.²⁰

Following Mandela’s arrest on August 5, 1962, the tenor of MK operations shifted from sabotage to preparations for probable exile. In October, the ANC held its first annual conference in three years in Lobatse, across the border from the Transvaal in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. This unusual meeting consisted of only a handful of ANC leaders, accompanied by a significantly larger contingent of dual SACP/ANC members serving on the influential steering committee.²¹ The Lobatse Conference, as historian Stephen Ellis points out, marked an important turning point in MK, as well as in the ever-changing relationship between the ANC and the SACP. At this meeting, the ANC formally adopted “armed struggle” as one of its principle means for achieving racial equality and democracy in South Africa. The ambiguity of MK’s autonomous status was erased as the ANC, under SACP influence, formally committed itself to a military solution. Although strong evidence suggests the ANC arrived at the decision under the undue influence of dual ANC/SACP members, this relationship can also be considered a marriage of convenience that conferred advantages on both parties, however uneven these might be. As Ellis indicates, the ANC’s legacy of mass politics provided the SACP with a popular legitimacy it w...