Southern African Liberation Research Articles

Defining and aiding “the Namibian refugee”: a history of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, 1974-76

ABSTRACT This article presents a history of the Chaplaincy to Namibians in Exile, focused on how the Chaplaincy’s first leader, Salatiel Ailonga, and his Finnish missionary wife, Anita Ailonga, defined and aided “the Namibian refugee.” The article discusses how Southern African liberation movements and host governments generally used the term “refugee,” before tracing the Ailongas’ particular intervention on behalf of displaced Namibians in mid-1970s Zambia and their entanglement with the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO)’s internal politics during that period. By presenting this history, the article illuminates a pivotal moment in Namibia’s exile past, during which SWAPO officials established a more centralized and hierarchical aid regime. Also, the paper suggests the value of biography for pushing beyond nationalist discourse on struggle-era humanitarianism and for developing an historical perspective on what it means to be a refugee.

Transnational Music Collaborations, Affective Networks and Everyday Practices of Convivial Solidarity in Ujamaa Dar es Salaam

Independent Tanzania became a prominent frontline state in the struggle against white minority regimes in the early 1960s and remained committed to the total liberation of Africa until South African repatriations in the early 1990s. For three decades the country was a hub of Pan-Africanism and saw an extraordinarily high involvement of Tanzanians in supporting the southern African liberation movements in ways that went beyond TANU/CCM’s primary directions. While some research has been done on the daily interactions, relationships and tensions in the ANC/MK and SWAPO settlements and military training camps as well as in the nearby towns and villages that hosted them, this article shifts the focus from the camps and their surroundings to the forging of solidarity and transnational connections in urban leisure spaces, particularly the music scene. It seeks to bring to light both the enduring and fleeting intimate relations and everyday forms of conviviality between South Africans and Tanzanians which were produced in Dar es Salaam’s nightclubs. The central argument is that artistic collaborations with South Africans outside the camps not only amplified and solidified Tanzanians’ ability to transcend the idea of the national, but were key to the shaping of a specific form of grassroots pan-Africanism that I will call ‘convivial transnational solidarity’. The latter is intended as a practice rather than as an ideology. As I will show, the urban soundscape was central to its emergence. The article first charts how national politics – a key aspect of which was the duty to embrace transnational solidarity – extended into the lower echelons of Tanzanian society through the airwaves, the press and liberation songs. Following the trajectory of the Tanzanian band Afro-70 and its leader Patrick Balidisya, it then examines the everyday acts of welcoming that unfolded in Dar es Salaam’s music scene during the brief historical juncture between 1969 and 1977, which coincided with ujamaa and with Afro-70’s rise and demise. The last part of the article problematises the process of total liberation and the idea of transnational solidarity by exposing their fragility.

Viriato da Cruz and His Chinese Exile: A Biographical Approach

Existing analyses of China’s involvement in late colonial Angola have an overwhelming focus on military support for competing independence movements. However, Maoism as an ideology had a more personal impact on Angolan elites in their struggle to define Angolan nationalism. Among them was Viriato da Cruz, an Angolan poet and nationalist who served as the secretary general of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) between 1962 and 1964. As a result of both ideological alignment and personal circumstances, Cruz lived in exile in the People’s Republic of China from 1966 until his death in 1973. Drawing on original archival, newspaper and oral sources, this article employs a biographical approach to analyse the connections between Angolan nationalism and Communist China through Viriato da Cruz’s life story. His intellectual and life adventures, played out beyond the confines of national borders and nationalist structures, reveal the mobile and transnational nature of southern African liberation. The article’s biographical approach also offers a unique opportunity to understand African history through the interaction between historical context and individuals.

Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’: Transnational Activism 1960–1990. Ed. Lena Dallywater, Chris Saunders, and Helder Adegar Fonseca. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019. xi, 202 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $89.99, hard bound.

Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’: Transnational Activism 1960–1990. Ed. Lena Dallywater, Chris Saunders, and Helder Adegar Fonseca. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019. xi, 202 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $89.99, hard bound. - Volume 79 Issue 2

(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.

Whose Atlantic? – Historiographies of South Africa, Namibia, OPSAAAL, and Central America

Abstract:During the 1970s and 1980s, southern African liberation movements lent rhetorical and sometimes material support to Central American guerilla groups. Such action represented both change and continuity within the previous decade’s non-aligned solidarities. This paper explores these connections and attempts to explain their significance on both sides of the ocean. It draws upon research in southern African and American archives in order to re-examine both spaces’ historiographies. Finally, it asks what these solidarities tell us about the nature of Cold War trans-oceanic linkages, fits them into debates over the nature of the discursive Atlantic, and ponders whether previous scholarship has effectively explored their significance.

Presidential transitions and generational change in Southern African liberation movements

SUMMARYRecent presidential transitions in Southern Africa have prompted suggestions that the region is moving towards a new generational politics which is more responsive to the need for economic reform and holds significant democratic possibilities. While this analysis concedes that this analysis has some considerable purchase, it argues that the evidence suggests that liberation movements are likely to remain mired in a morass of patronage and corruption, and that there will be as much continuity as change.

The Pan Africanist Congress and the Congo Alliance, 1963–1964

This article examines the Pan Africanist Congress’ (PAC) participation in the so-called Congo Alliance and its operations in what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1963 and 1964. The alliance represented an attractive opportunity for the PAC to receive much needed political, financial, and military support to set up and maintain its operations in exile. It also held out the chance to establish regional connections with other liberation movements that could assist the PAC in the launch of its armed struggle. However, the PAC’s inefficient logistical organisation, lack of leadership on the ground, and growing factionalism, combined with the Congolese government’s instability and inadequate commitment, made the PAC’s Congo operations a short-lived affair. This article outlines the formation and demise of the PAC’s Congo mission. Although brief and ending in failure, the PAC’s participation in the Congo Alliance is nonetheless symbolic of the early exile experiences of southern African liberation movements – particularly the benefits of establishing working alliances, the importance of transnational networks in maintaining operations, and the overall difficulties of life in exile.

Locating exile: decolonization, anti-imperial spaces and Zimbabwean students in Britain, 1965–1980

Exile is usually cast as a time of hardship, narrated through tropes of nostalgia and loss. Yet it is not always experienced and remembered in this way. This article provides a counterpoint to the familiar nostalgic lament by exploring the narratives of Zimbabwean students ‘in exile’ in Britain during the country's liberation war of 1965–1980, who looked back on their stay in the imperial heartland as a time of opportunity and excitement. They recalled their own youthful militancy, the optimism of liberation movements before independence and invoked the conviviality of joint political campaigns with British-based allies. The article explains their up-beat recollections by locating exile in transnational socio-political spaces created by Rhodesia's contested sovereignty, focusing on exiles' relations with mainstream liberal-left solidarity organizations, with Caribbean/black British groups and the liberation movements' own transnational networks. By locating exile in this way, the article extends two hitherto disconnected bodies of scholarship – on southern African nationalisms in the making and British decolonization and postcolonial cultural politics. It highlights how Zimbabwean students helped foster liberation movements' international standing and their influence on post-independence ideas of status. The article also offers a new vantage point on Britain's re-racialized cultural politics, as performed in middle-class spaces on student campuses and internationalist campaigns. Zimbabwean students' accounts of exile in Britain can thus do more than reveal the inadequacies of generalisations about a singular exile condition. Their narratives of the opportunities and sociability of exile in Britain reveal the occlusions of narrow military versions of southern African liberation history, while adding new, transnational dimensions to historical geographies of decolonization, urban cosmopolitanism and the African presence in 1960s and 1970s Britain.

Icon(oclastic): John S Saul reflects on Southern African liberation struggles

ABSTRACTJohn Shannon Saul has described himself as a ‘revolutionary traveller’. Over the past five decades (and counting!) he has been involved in profound social, political and economic change in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. These decades saw active building of the left in Canada as well, with Saul working as an activist in the Southern African solidarity movement, challenging Canadian government and corporate collusion with white dictatorship and, later, their participation in the ‘recolonisation’ of that region. An author (more than 20 volumes and a vast number of academic and popular articles), an editor (This Magazine; Southern Africa Report), and an activist, Saul remains committed to anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist work in Canada, Africa and elsewhere. In this article he reflects on his career working on liberation movements and revolutionary struggles, while at the same time looking forward to new challenges and opportunities.

The Ruth First Papers Project: digitising the Ruth First archive

Soon after Ruth First was murdered in 1982 an appeal went out for funds to create a Trust in Ruth's name. In the 1980s the Trust found a home for Ruth's papers and documents at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS) in London under Shula Marks' directorship. The hope was that the archive would be part of a centre that would study southern African liberation, continuing work that had been brutally cut short by Ruth's murder in Maputo. In 2012 the ICwS launched the Ruth First Papers Project, which aims to digitise the archive of Ruth's papers. A dedicated website was established where the first selection of documents has been made available for anyone (anywhere) to consult. In this brief introduction, Rockel and Mahon – researchers on the project – describe the process of selecting documents for digitisation and the experience of encountering Ruth in the archives.

THE HOT “COLD WAR”: THE USSR IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Vladimir Shubin is the Deputy Director of the Institute for African Studies inthe Russian Academy of Sciences and a former officer in the Soviet armed forces,and subsequently, a member (eventually secretary) of the Soviet Afro-AsianSolidarity Committee and desk officer (eventually head) of the African Section ofthe Communist Party of the USSR. In the latter two capacities he became intenselyinvolved in supporting Southern African liberation movements on behalf of theUSSR.In The Hot “Cold War”: The USSR in Southern Africa Shubin aims to ‘set therecord straight’ with regard to Moscow’s involvement in Southern Africa during theCold War, especially the role of the Soviet military, which he believes ‘is coveredinadequately or even distorted’ (p. xv). His work is divided into five parts dealing insuccession with the liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe,Namibia and South Africa during the period 1960 to 1990.

<i>Third World Express</i> : trains and “revolution” in Southern African poetry

This article examines political dimensions of the train metaphor in selected Southern African poems, some of them in English translation. Exploring work by Mongane Serote, B.W. Vilakazi, Demetrius Segooa, Phedi Tlhobolo, Thami Mseleku, Jeremy Cronin, Alan Lennox-Short, Anthony Farmer, Freedom T.V. Nyamubaya, Abduraghiem Johnstone and Mondli Gwala, the argument shows some of the ways in which the technological character of trains and railways is made to carry a message of political insurrection and revolution. The author shows that the political potential of the railway metaphor builds on the general response to railways evident in poems indebted to traditional African praise poetry. The article also demonstrates that political contention within different strands of the Southern African liberation movement could also find expression using the railway metaphor.

Post-colonial Nation-building and Southern African Liberation: Tanzania and the Break of Diplomatic Relations with the United Kingdom, 1965–1968

On 15 December 1965 Tanzania broke off diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom (UK) because of Harold Wilson's policy towards Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). Although Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere took this course of action to comply with a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Organisation of African Unity, he made the support for Rhodesian independence a central pillar of Tanzania's nation-building project. Since 1967 human dignity, African liberation and opposition to racialism and colonialism became central tenets of both Tanzania's foreign policy as well as the Ujamaa socialist policy implemented internally by its government. The loss of a British £ 7.5 million loan notwithstanding, Tanzania's unyielding criticism of British policy towards UDI strengthened Nyerere's national and international legitimacy and reinforced the Tanganyika African National Union's hegemony over the national political space. Relations between Tanzania and the UK were finally restored in July 1968, after the other African governments had re-established them. Nyerere felt sure that this policy reversal would not put at risk his government's political legitimacy.

Liberation Movements, Exile, and International Solidarity: An Introduction* * I am grateful to Wayne Dooling and Donal Lowry for their suggestions and references, and Saul Dubow, Shula Marks and Jeremy Krikler for their incisive comments on an original draft of this introduction. Thula Simpson kindly made his unpublished articles available to me.

The publication of a special issue of this journal devoted to the entwined histories of the Southern African liberation struggles and international solidarity has been timed to coincide with the 50...

The 1970s: The Anti-Apartheid Movement's Difficult Decade

The 1970s were a pivotal decade in the Southern African liberation struggle. In 1975 Mozambique and Angola won their independence from Portugal, transforming the Southern African region. In South Africa, after a period in the late 1960s when internal opposition seemed crushed, the Black Consciousness Movement and the growth of independent trade unions signalled the growth of a new resistance. At the same time, changing attitudes to race in a postcolonial world made apartheid more difficult to defend. Even international corporations, whose high rates of profit depended on the subsistence wages they paid their black employees, needed to find an acceptable rationale for continuing to invest in South Africa. These changes threw up new challenges for the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The establishment of Marxist governments in the former Portuguese colonies and the involvement of Cuba in Angola thrust Southern Africa into the frontline of the Cold War. It was unclear how the emergence of the new movements in South Africa would affect the course of the struggle and the role of the African National Congress (ANC). And the arguments for constructive engagement put forward by business interests ran counter to the AAM's advocacy of the total isolation of South Africa. These arguments gained currency in sections of the British trade union movement, the churches and other constituencies to which the AAM looked for support. This article examines how the AAM responded to these challenges and how it emerged to become a mass movement in the 1980s.

Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project

This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex epistemological, political, and technical challenges that they confronted in their endeavor to construct a digital archive that might help reorient scholarly debates on the struggle for liberation.

Mugabe, Gramsci, and Zimbabwe at 25

Twenty-five years after Robert Mugabe brought Zimbabwe to independence in 1980, some might interpret the current, apparent reradicalization of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front's (ZANU-PF) political project as a last, leftist, quasi-Gramscian gambit to recapture lost popular legitimacy. Many more, however, see it instead as reflecting the final throes of an increasingly compromised, corrupt, militarized, and unpopular regime. In this article, we will emphasize the extent to which present policies do indeed reflect the material-political consequences (and contradictions) of the historic class compromises Mugabe and ZANU-PF have made in Zimbabwe and the deep-seated confrontation between elite interests and those of the mass of the population that Mugabe now seeks to obfuscate with mere rhetoric and opportunist policies.For Robert Mugabe, arch-strategist and Machiavellian power broker though he may be, has now been forced to confront the material-political consequences of the historic class compromises he has made. The implications of the developing set of tensions and contradictions fostered during Mugabe's 25 years in power are the main focus of this essay. We will assess just what has been produced during that quarter-century in terms of both the opportunities for, and the obstacles to, the resumed transformation of struggle currently claimed by Mugabe to be ZANU-PF's goal.I NATIONALISM AS PRESUMPTIVE HEGEMONYFor those who were active in the international support network for southern African liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, the prospective coming to power of a majority-rule government in Rhodesia (henceforth Zimbabwe) in the late 1970s brought considerable joy, even though it produced a rejoicing that was somewhat qualified. It was not the demise of the despised white-minority regime of Ian Smith that tempered the celebration of blackmajority rule. Rather, it was the nature of the resistance itself that gave observers pause, because the nationalist movement was itself completely divided. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing in the abstract (from the point of view of long-term democratic prospects in a free Zimbabwe, for example). Yet it certainly seemed so in the immediate case of Zimbabwe-given the empty juxtaposition of personal ambitions that polarized the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and ZANU and enflamed hostilities between the two movements, and also the backward-looking and unproductive ethnic ambitions (Ndebele and Shona, to go no further) that hovered just beneath the surface of liberation movement rivalry. Thus, in the 1970s, it could be plausibly argued (as it was by one of the present authors) that the internal rivalries that racked the Zimbabwean nationalist camp smacked more of the same old wasting kind of petty-bourgeois political infighting-centered upon personalities, intrigues, and the mobilization of constituencies around ethnic identifications, all long-time features of a Zimbabwean exile politics untransformed by effective struggle.1The established militarized wings of the nationalist movement ultimately emerged to play a crucial part in the transition to majority rule.2 ZANU-PF (no longer joined at the election with ZAPU-PF in the Patriotic Front as it had briefly been but willing to share a few cabinet posts afterwards) handily won the pre-independence election of March 1980, and stood ready to take power with the coming of independence in April. Faced with such evidence of success, however, some on the left who had been skeptical as to ZANU's claims were tempted to begin to rethink the movement's radical credentials. In doing so, they were encouraged by far more conservative commentators who now also cast Mugabe as a deft man of the left, one prepared to use short-term compromises to tempt the existing (largely white) bourgeoisie into acquiescing to change-while all along harbouring long-term goals of genuinely radical transformation. …

Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project

Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project

Cuba and the Liberation of Southern Africa

From the 1970s onward, Cuba provided military and developmental assistance that helped stabilize the governments of Angola and Mozambique and strengthened such liberation movements in Southern Africa as the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, the Southwest African Peoples Organization in Namibia (SWAPO), and the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC). With the military advisors and training provided by Cuba, Southern African liberation movements were able successfully to challenge the power of white minority governments in the region. Above all, Cuba helped undermine these governments by fighting alongside the African nationalists in Angola.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.