Arianna Lissoni

Introduction: ‘Life after Thirty’ – A Critical Celebration

In 1977, a group of Johannesburg-based academics launched the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) History Workshop (hereafter HW), in a move that would reconfigure the landscape of South African historiography. So, in 2009, on the occasion of thirty-odd years of the HW, it was resolved to host an event that would not only celebrate its longevity, but also reflect critically on its practice. Imagined as an opportune moment reflexively to interrogate the HW’s past, present, and indeed future, a colloquium was convened that involved a weekend’s worth (3 to 5 April) of sustained critical intellectual exchange, debate, and dialogue. Local and international scholars – those intimately involved with the HW, those with only a passing familiarity, and even some of its most outspoken critics – were brought together around several select themes that carefully, and often critically, engaged the HW’s practice across both time and space.

The PAC in Basutoland, c. 1962–1965

ABSTRACT This article examines the activities of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in the former British Protectorate of Basutoland (Lesotho), where the organisation set up its first external headquarters from 1962 to 1965. Following a spell of disorientation in the aftermath of Sharpeville, the PAC leadership (under the command of general secretary P.K. Leballo) gradually regrouped in Maseru where they established a strategic base thanks to the fraternal and material support they received from Ntsu Mokhehles Basutoland Congress Party (BCP). Here they began to plot a violent uprising in coordination with underground units in South Africa, first in 1963 and again in 1964. The reasons for the failure of both these attempts are analysed in terms of the PACs exile politics with specific reference to the Basutoland political context. Lastly, the article considers both the immediate and long-term consequences of the Basutoland experience for the PAC exile history.

'Let's talk about Bantustans'

‘Politically, the bantustans are the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’, wrote Stephen Bantu Biko in a 1972 essay titled Let’s Talk About Bantustans. In it, Biko advanced a careful analytical and political critique of the bantustans and ended with the revolutionary call: ‘Down with Bantustans!’ Nearly two decades later, Biko’s call had been realised and the era of the bantustans was ostensibly over. Yet, in 2010, the NRF Chair in Local Histories and Present Realities at Wits University was hosting more than a dozen researchers and postgraduate students conducting in-depth historically-informed research in multiple field sites across the northern provinces of the Free State, Mpumalanga, North-West and Limpopo and increasingly, each of us were beginning to confront the unmistakable afterlives of that ‘greatest single fraud’. As we were beginning to find, indelibly inscribed in the social cultural and aesthetic life in the rural hinterlands of the country’s interior were the pervasive and durable legacies of the bantustans. From struggles over land, to contestations of chieftainship, and the transformation of local elites, the histories of the former bantustans proved critical to understanding the contemporary landscape of some of the dry, dusty expanses of the rural north. These experiences, however, did not easily fit the existing historiography of the ‘homelands’. The scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who studied the bantustans did so largely to expose their illegitimacy. Historiographies of the ‘homelands’ produced univalent readings of the political logics of the bantustans as instruments of apartheid repression and control, and they trained most of their analyses on the most developed bantustans of the coastal provinces, especially the Transkei, Ciskei, and KwaZulu. It turned out that we knew relatively little about the large swathes of bantustan territories in the northern interior Lebowa, KwaNdebele, Venda, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, Bophutatswana and QwaQwa. We knew not enough about the variety of ‘homeland’ formations produced by different regional

Transformations in the ANC External Mission and Umkhonto we Sizwe, c. 1960–1969*

This article focuses on key policy, strategic and ideological developments in the ANC external mission and its army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), during their first decade of exile. It seeks to illustrate that the ANCs transformation into a liberation movement in exile during this period and its continued survival were not a matter of unproblematic progression. Rather, this process entailed a series of re-negotiations and re-adjustments, which were triggered by changes in the material conditions of struggle as they unfolded after Sharpeville. The difficulty experienced by the ANC leadership in exile in grappling with these changes produced potentially disintegrative internal strains in the second half of the decade, which can be viewed as the main catalysts behind the call for a Consultative Conference in Morogoro in 1969. At a leadership level, these tensions concerned issues of representation, organisational structure and, ultimately, political strategy. At the heart of the debate between the ANC and its allies was the full incorporation of all South African exiles previously associated with the Congress Movement into the external mission, signalling a gradual transition from the multi-racialism of the 1950s to the creation of a unitary, non-racial liberation front. Closely related to the issue of non-racialism was the progressive adjustment of the ANC to the armed struggle, which was made especially difficult by the continued separation of military from political structures. Hence the concern of this article with the state of affairs within MK, in particular with pressures from below, matters of military strategy, and the relationship between the military and the political movement.

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

ABSTRACT Most 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.

Africa's ‘Little Israel’: Bophuthatswana's Not-So-Secret Ties With Israel

ABSTRACT Since its inception in the early 1970s, the secret military and nuclear alliance between the Israeli state and apartheid South Africa has been the subject of much debate. Given its sensitive nature, however, much of the content of such a relationship was for a long time inaccessible and could only be inferred. Whereas the Israeli–South African military alliance had to be kept in the dark or remain ‘unspoken’, there is another relationship between these two countries which was very public in its day, and yet it appears to have been largely forgotten, despite the high visibility of the physical traces it has left impressed on South Africas landscape. The relationship in question, which started as an offshoot of the Pretoria–Jerusalem axis and forms the subject of this article, is the one between Israel and the Bophuthatswana bantustan during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Changes to the South African Historical Journal

The coordinating editors of the South African Historical Journal (SAHJ) are pleased to announce that the changes to the structure of the journals Editorial Board that were approved at the last Sou...