African Liberation Struggle Research Articles

Durban Moments

This essay reviews a series of photographs by South African photographer Omar Badsha exhibited as part of Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15). Collectively entitled Once We Were Warriors: Women and Resistance in the South African Liberation Struggle (1981–1999), the thirty-one images selected for SB15 highlight the role of women as political activists during the 1980s and 1990s across South Africa. The essay discusses Badsha’s biography and approach to photography, in addition to appraising the images themselves.

The Realignment of Poqo as the PAC: A Remedial to South Africa’s Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Liberation Historiography

Post-apartheid South Africa’s liberation historiography has been constructed and curated in a manner that influences public and collective memory to assume that only one specific liberation movement (the African National Congress) was involved in the South African liberation struggle. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and its military wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), have largely been given perfunctory attention or ignored because of bias and the selective politics of memory. In instances where the history of PAC or APLA is given some attention pre and post-apartheid, the focus has been mainly on uPoqo as the paramilitary wing of the PAC, or on the leadership conflicts within it, at the expense of interrogating other important aspects within the movement. This article explores the development of the term Poqo, mapping its roots from the shorthand for “Umbutho wama-Afrika Poqo.” It then shows that the prohibition of the PAC in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre led the movement to operate under the auspices of Poqo, an underground name. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that Poqo was not a paramilitary wing of the PAC but is/was the PAC itself in another form. Ultimately, this historical and historiographical contribution seeks to achieve a re-alignment of Poqo in South Africa’s post-apartheid history writing and public memory.

Sweden Against Apartheid: A Historical Overview

Sweden’s relations with the South African liberation movements date back to the 1960s, when the Swedish anti-apartheid movementarose. In addition to moral support and about $400 million dollars in financial support, Sweden became the first Western country to give official political support to the anti-apartheid movement. Such was the relationship between the African National Congress (ANC) and Sweden, that the latter became the first country outside of Africa to be visited by Nelson Mandela in 1990, after his release from decades of imprisonment. The aim of this contribution is therefore to provide a brief synopsis of the rich history of Sweden’s solidaritywith the South African liberation struggle and the role played by the Swedish youth, the Swedish antiapartheid movement, civil society, trade unions, and Olof Palme, former Swedish prime minister, who was one of the most committed allies of the liberation movements.

Fugitive infrastructure in the fight against South African apartheid

ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the case study of a secret communication infrastructure developed as part of Operation Vula and operational from 1988 to 1991 during the final years of the South African liberation struggle. The purpose of Vula was to bring key leaders back from exile to steer from the ground the machinery of mass movement against the apartheid regime. To make Vula a reality in a highly militarised South Africa in the late 1980s a whole infrastructure of covered resistance (physical, technical, and people-based) was necessary. I propose the concept of fugitive infrastructure to understand this form of resistance. I suggest that the secret Vula mission and its communication system can be interpreted as a fugitive infrastructure whereby the system comprised not only an instrument for coordinating resistance to the apartheid regime but also a materialisation, at the level of infrastructure, of a potential alternative future for South Africans. Methodologically, this paper is based on mixed data collection methods including empirical and archival materials collected and analysed during my Ph.D. research.

Cape mission liberalism and the South African liberation struggle

ABSTRACT To help us better understand the impact of European colonisation on South African political thought, it is important to recognise the role played by both race and religion. Given the outsized role that Christian mission schools have had on South African political history, this article seeks to identify how the Cape mission liberal tradition, specifically, influenced twentieth-century South African political thought. By examining the lives and ideas of Z.K. Matthews and Govan Mbeki, this article shows how both liberal and communist strains of African nationalism present in the liberation struggle were influenced by the mission liberal tradition.

Monuments of the Exiles and Memorialisation of Shared Heritage Between Mozambique and Tanzania

The Tanzanian landscape has a long history with exiled nationalist organisations from South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The case of Mozambique is unique. It was in Dar es Salaam that FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) was born in 1962; but the great Mozambican nationalist Edward Mondlane was assassinated in the same city in 1969. This paper presents the ruins of the FRELIMO camp in Nachingwea, Tanzania, to elaborate the state of preservation of the monuments and how such preservation may contribute to sustainable peace between these two neighbouring countries. There are recognisable photographs and written historical documents concerning FRELIMO in both Mozambican and Tanzanian libraries, museums, and archives. Adding the landscape as another layer of evidence juxtaposes the limitations unveiled in other sources; enhances our understanding of the activities that took place during exile including those of the subalterns (residential houses, food carriers, couriers, recruiting sergeants and foot soldiers); and underlines the process of how sites of African liberation struggles are remembered and memorialised.

Screening Winnie and African Feminist Herstories

This teaching note offers reflections on the screening of Winnie an autobiographical documentary about the life of Winnie Mandela, South African liberation struggle actor. I explore the pedagogical decisions I made in screening this film which deals with the history of apartheid South Africa to a mixed audience at a university in London.

‘Literacy, Armed Struggle and Black Consciousness’: The Evolution of NAYO, 1973–1976

ABSTRACT Within the literature on Black Consciousness, the National Youth Organization (NAYO) is relatively unknown compared to its sister organisations like the South African Student Organization (SASO) and South African Students’ Movement (SASM). Organisers in NAYO played a significant role conscientising and organising with the working people of South Africa’s Black urban landscape. The organisation was a space created for Black South African youth who were not based in secondary or tertiary education. Hence, it disproportionately attracted the working poor and what Marxists would call the lumpen-proletariat population. Their politicising under Black Consciousness and actions to spread NAYO’s gospel left an indelible mark on the South African liberation struggle during the 1970s and beyond. Lastly, NAYO and its various regional branches served as a recruiting ground for the various South African armed wings in exile during the 1970s.

An Afrocentric Re-storying of Africa’s Struggle for Emancipation in Ngugi’s Selected Novels

The story of African liberation struggle has, over many years, been related in a colonial and neo-colonial manner by the imperial powers, with Africa delineated as a dark continent and Europe as a civilised one. This article, therefore, strives to disrupt this oppressive narrative by painting the correct version through Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat (1967) (AGW) and Matigari (1987). Kenya is used as a microcosm of the entire Africa in these novels. Furthermore, the study is a qualitative recounting of the African liberation struggle which is underpinned by Afrocentricity as an emancipatory theoretical strand. Purposive sampling, guided by exploratory research design, was employed to select the two texts by Ngugi because of their appositeness to the study. Narrative textual analysis was used to interpret the two novels as primary data. Ngugi conscientises Africans about their African liberation history in order for them to cultivate a true African identity (Biko,1978).

The Travelling Toyi-Toyi: Soldiers and the Politics of Drill

The toyi-toyi is commonly described as a high-stepping ‘dance’ and associated above all with the anti-apartheid protests of the mid 1980s in South Africa’s townships. Its origins are, however, some two decades earlier and nearly 5,000 miles to the north, in the military training given to cadres of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) in Algeria. Now, the toyi-toyi is as often used in protest against governments led by the region’s former liberation movements as in displays of support for them. Between its Algerian origins and its current incarnations, the toyi-toyi has carried many meanings. We focus here on how veterans of the Zimbabwean and South African liberation struggles remembered the wartime toyi-toyi in oral histories and memoir. Veterans of ZAPU’s armed wing traced the toyi-toyi’s travels from north to south, in training regimes in the military camps of Algeria, Tanzania and Zambia. They remembered it as a defining feature of their army, able to create powerful bonds of loyalty and the physical toughness necessary to survival on the battlefield. Veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the African National Congress’ armed wing, learned the toyi-toyi from ZAPU cadres in shared camps. They agreed that it was emblematic of ZAPU’s army, but often portrayed it as an expression of an intolerant, macho militarism that had corrupted MK, above all in its Angolan camps. For all these former soldiers, the toyi-toyi became both a symbol and vector of particular kinds of military strategy, political belief and masculinist bodily power that provided a means of talking about influences and tensions between and within liberation movements. Tracing the toyi-toyi’s travels allows us to see how liberation movements’ military cultures were made, moved and revalued over time and across a vast geographical terrain.

Comparing the Namibian and South African Liberation Struggles

Abstract This essay is a preliminary attempt to compare the ways in which the liberation struggles in Namibia and South Africa have been memorialised, both in non-fiction writing about the two struggles and in monuments, memorials and museums. Such a comparison needs to be undertaken through contextualising the two struggles. Though they have some similar features, the ways they have been memorialised are strikingly different, with the armed struggle having been given much greater emphasis in Namibia than in South Africa.

Mafeje on black struggles in South Africa: history and theory

ABSTRACT Archie Mafeje had an unusual ability for socio-political prognosis. This is true both in terms of his theoretical and of his concrete analysis of the South African liberation struggle. Much of what he wrote in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is still relevant today. Although he had hoped for a socialist democracy, things did not turn out that way. In his work on revolutionary theory and politics, Mafeje set out to understand the path to complete liberation, primarily of the African people, but also of oppressed people in other parts of the world, generally. This article revisits Mafeje’s conception of the South African revolution.

(Re)imagining Mandela's Leadership esiXhoseni

Much public discourse positions Nelson Mandela as a global figure who embraced Western English ideals characterised by liberal human rights and heroic individual leadership. This paper challenges that decontextualised presentation of Mandela by locating him esiXhoseni, which is his ancestral, linguistic, geographic and epistemic locality. Pulling Mandela's leadership traits into his indigenous traditions and origins provides an opportunity to (re)imagine the philosophical and moral tools he utilised to form his personal and social sensibilities in the execution of his political responsibilities as an African freedom fighter and statesman. This study also contextualises how Mandela utilised isiXhosa as an African leadership philosophy in the struggle for social justice across his personal and political life. If we are to properly comprehend the primary influences that shaped the ontological canons of Southern African liberation struggle figures, then we must labour to understand how their local and indigenous African languages constructed their political consciousness, principles, ethics, ideals, moral codes and leadership qualities.

Giving Berth: Fiji, Black Women’s Internationalism, and the Pacific Women’s Conference of 1975

Abstract This essay is centered on Fiji’s Pacific Women’s Conference (PWC) of 1975. It adds to Africana scholarship by demonstrating how Black women’s internationalism weaved across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean worlds. Organized by Fijian women such as Amelia Rokotuivuna, Claire Slatter, and Vanessa Griffen, the conference was a unified berth for Pacifica women to address the interlocking regional issues of gender, neocolonialism, ecological justice, human rights, ethnicity, race, culture, and sovereignty. These women helped transform Suva, Fiji, into a hub for Pacifica nationalist movements, such as the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP). They also attended the United Nations World Conference on Women in Mexico City (1975). Slatter and Griffen edited NFIP’s newsletter, Povai, which became a collective voice for Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian anticolonial struggles. The PWC occurred at a critical moment of Indigenous, Global South women’s and anticolonial liberation struggles across the region. Conference participants represented political movements from across New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Tahiti, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas. They denounced French, Australian, American, British, and Indonesian (neo)colonialism and imperialism in the South Pacific. This highlighted the relationships between Oceanic, Asian, African American, Caribbean, and African liberation struggles.

What’s in a name? A feminist reflection on street name changes in Durban

abstractA city landscape is always already politicised, but often the power, identity and discursive dynamics appear natural and politically innocent. However, any changes to this landscape – as with street renaming – bring politics to the fore. This process is often highly contested, as was experienced in Durban during the 2007/2008 changes, and persists to date. This reveals the ongoing social divisions and disaffection in contemporary South Africa, and is even more intriguing given the focus on colonial and apartheid symbols as points of resistance in student movements like #RhodesMustFall which began in 2015.In this piece I revisit research I conducted at the height of the Durban street renaming process through a gendered lens. This new reading further complicates the inherently contested and dynamic postcolonial, post-apartheid landscape by deconstructing gender with and within the historical, nationalist, and racialised discourses of renaming. In particular this open forum piece raises questions around commemorating the role of women in the South African liberation struggle, and the depoliticising effect of bureaucratic and legal processes. This reflection is critical given a current lack of feminist thought on street and place renaming despite its existence as an ongoing government driven process of healing and remembering within South Africa.

Unintended consequences of cosmopolitanism: Malcolm X, Africa, and revolutionary theorizing in the black power movement in the US

During the black power movement (BPM) in the US and the contemporaneous anti-colonial movement in Africa, African-Americans sought to emulate the liberation struggles in Africa. BPM revolutionists, epitomized by Malcolm X, attempted to adopt the practices of the African liberation struggle to overthrow white supremacism in the US. Pursuant to that, Malcolm developed his thesis on black revolution in the US from a static, unidimensional, religious-based conception into a dynamic, multidimensional, secular framework; however, the cosmopolitan turn in Malcolm’s influential thesis inadvertently limited its applicability to the US. Specifically, it contributed to (1) Malcolm’s reverse civilizationism, which privileged developments in Africa over those in the US; (2) his conflation of the conditions facing Africans with those faced by African-Americans, suggesting the salience of a colonial framework in understanding both; (3) his adoption of a UN petition strategy to address the human rights issues of black America, following a failed strategy of previous activists. Each of these unintended consequences of Malcolm’s cosmopolitan turn contributed to the theoretical enervation of the BPM.

The Emphasis to the History of the South African Liberation Struggle in the Nation’s Universities

This article analyses the emphasis given to the teaching of the South African liberation struggle history at the country’s universities. Although this history has been analyzed in books, chapters, journal articles, conference papers, theses,and dissertations by South African scholars working in various disciplines, it is generally underrepresented in the curricula of the country’s universities. This absence stems, at least in part, from the racial segregation that divided South African universities until the end of Apartheid in 1994. Today, the overwhelming majority of lecturers devote, on average, six or fewer of their annual class sessions to the subject, when most university modules run from seven to fourteen weeks. Despite the limited time given to topics on South African liberation struggle history, a majority of academics surveyed in history and political science departments believe that their institution’s undergraduate curriculum deals sufficiently with the history. Thus, aside from some notable exceptions, South African departments of history and political science have failed to integrate this eld within the broader study of national history. As a result, most university-educated South Africans lack post-secondary formal study on the history of the liberation struggle, a reality that affects the development of research and scholarship on this topic.

The historical significance of African liberation – the views of South African History Education students

Abstract This study drew on the views of South African first-year history education students who are studying to become teachers. In an open-ended survey they were asked to, by means of intellectual imagination, to express their views on what topics they would like to see as part of the school history curriculum. The purpose of this was to determine what they regarded as historically significant enough to study in history at school. The responses were analysed by means of open coding and read through Counsell’s conceptualisation of historical significance. What emerged was that the struggle against apartheid was viewed by only handful as an actual struggle for liberation against internal colonialism. The African liberation struggles against European colonialism fared even worse and was only imagined by a small number of students as worthy of inclusion in an imagined school history curriculum. At the same time at no stage were the struggled against apartheid linked to the broader African liberation struggle. What this speaks of is no only a South African exceptionalism but a view that the African liberation struggle are not really historically significant enough to be include in a imagined history curriculum.

‘Dear Comrade Chief Rep’: Love, marriage and the family in the ANC in Exile in Tanzania

ABSTRACTMost studies about the South African liberation struggle have focused on political and strategic concerns at the level of formal organisations and their leadership. Yet the anti-apartheid struggle also impacted on personal relationships and the social life of those who put their lives in its service. This article draws on correspondence between members of the African National Congress in exile based in Tanzania and the organisation’s chief representative in the region concerning permission, recognition and guidance on love, marriage and family-related matters in the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. It analyses how the demands of the struggle, and the difficult exile context, shaped love and family relationships and conceptions, and the ways in which individual cadres negotiated their personal lives while engaging in a political struggle as part of a collective movement. The disciplinary and parental role that the ANC in exile exercised through the bureaucratic process developed to manage these relations is also examined through the prism of the correspondence. The article argues that the governance of personal life by the ANC in exile was an integral part of nation-building and state-making – fulfilling both bureaucratic and affective functions.

African Philosophy in Pursuit of an African Renaissance for the True Liberation of African Women

The African liberation struggle fought against two intertwined forces, colonization and colonialism. The former implied physical occupation and dispossession of Africans’ land, while the latter implied destruction of their culture. While “political independence” succeeded in an artificial and superficial sense in granting space for African cultural reclamation, this success presented little or no joy in restoring the dignified space that African women enjoyed in pre-colonial Africa. African women — in spite of the granting of “independence” and “freedom”— continue to be denied their freedom in African communities, and relegated to a second-class citizen status. I argue that if freedom is to have any significant meaning for Africans, it must prioritize the African cultural reclamation that puts African women in the center. This can and will be possible when Africans interrogate African philosophical assumptions about women’s “place” in traditional Africa. A thorough exercise in this regard will assist in giving meaning to an African renaissance that will secure liberation not only for African men but also for women.