Африка. История и историки

Коллектив авторов

Let us now consider some of the new work on each of these four periods in turn.

1. Founding and early History to 1940

Undoubtedly the most important work to have appeared in the centenary year on the establishment of the ANC takes the story to, but not beyond, the meeting in Waaihoek, Bloemfontein, in January 1912 at which SANNC was founded. Andre Odendaal’s «Te Founders», subtitled «Te Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa», contains almost 500 pages of text, followed by 56 pages of notes in very small font, and this refects the extent of the research that underpins the volume [730] . Te book draws upon Odendaal’s most impressive master’s dissertation, published as «Vukani Bantu: the Beginnings of Black Protest Politics to 1910» as long ago as 1984, the doctoral dissertation that he completed at the University of Cambridge in 1983 on «African Political Mobilisation in the Eastern Cape, 1880–1912» and new research, especially on African organisations outside the Cape. Te result is a masterly synthesis, which inter aliaexplores the impact of the South African war on black African organisation in the four states of what became South Africa, then how the process leading to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 galvanised black Africans into united action. «Te Founders» ofers a mass of new information on many members of the new educated African elite and their activities in the late nineteenth century and frst decade of the twentieth. Odendaal calls his work «an organisational or “family” history, which seeks to construct a group biography of the frst generations of activists and political bodies in South Africa» (P. XIII–XIV). As he says, he only addresses historiographical debates on his period implicitly, his main concern being «to restore the African voice and identity» (P. XIV). The key that unlocked the door to this was his reading of the early newspapers published for black readers, newspapers that contained content both in English and in indigenous languages.

730

Odendaal A. Te Founders: Te Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa. Cape Town, 2012.

Writing in 1984, Odendaal wondered whether the ANC, when it reached its centenary in 2012, would be

«guerrilla or government» (P. XV). Now that we know the answer, he ends his Introduction to his new book by expressing the hope that the past he has recovered «will inspire those both inside and outside the ANC… to proceed into the future more enlightened and more emboldened in the pursuit of human dignity and democracy» (P. XV). He clearly writes as an admirer of the ANC, who has not allowed disillusionment with it in the present to afect his retelling of what he sees as an inspiring story of people struggling for equal rights. One can of course quibble with the way he has presented some of his material – the struggle against segregation in the early twentieth century was hardly one for democracy in the sense that we know today, for example, which makes his sub-title less than accurate – but this is a major scholarly work, which will retain its importance long into the future.

The same cannot be said for another book that became available in 2012, though published in 2011, the frst full-scale biography of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the driving force behind the establishment of the South African Native National Congress in January 1912 [731] . Moss Mashamaite’s «Te Second Coming» is an ofen poorly written and self-indulgent amalgam of scattered information about Seme, about whom the author writes in hyperbole, at one point calling him «Arguably the most important historical South African fgure» (P. 37). Tough Mashamaite has found some interesting new information about Seme’s role in the establishment of the Native Farmers Association of Africa (Chapter 6 and especially P. 165f), his book is far from being the seminal biography that Seme deserves, one on the lines of, say, to Brian Willan’s monumental biography of Seme’s colleague Sol. T. Plaatje, the frst Secreatry General of the South African Native National Congress or Heather Hughes’s powerfully-written life of John Dube, the frst President-General of the organisation [732] . «Te Second Coming» is especially weak on Seme’s later years, including his disastrous presidency of the ANC from 1930 (Chapter 14), where Mashamaite makes no use of Marvin Faison’s thesis, which remains the most detailed study on that period of Seme’s life [733] .

731

Mashamaite M. Te Second Coming: Te Life and Times of Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the Founder of the ANC. Pretoria, 2011. Mashamaite explains his title by writing that he aimed through his book to bring Seme «back for the Second Time»: n.p. (P. 14). Mashamaite is the author of an apologia for Jacob Zuma entitled «Te Moving Finger Writes», a book described as «a full-tilt insomniac rant» (URL:.

732

Willan B. Sol. T. Plaatje: A biography. London, 1984; Hughes H. First President. Johannesburg, 2011.

733

Faison M. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, President-General of the African National Congress 1930–1937. MA thesis (Columbia University), 1983.

Seme’s role in relation to the various newspapers he established is sketched briefy in one of the chapters (P. 8) of Mashamaite’s book [734] . How much more can be learned of the most important paper Seme founded, «Abantu-Batho», can now be seen from «The People’s Paper: A Centenary History and Anthology of Abantu-Batho» edited by Peter Limb [735] . When he founded the newspaper in 1912, Seme expected it to become SANNC’s national newspaper, which it was only for a relatively short period, and it limped along before it folded in 1931, yet it is a key source of information about black politics in the ANC’s frst two decades. Ye t while leading African politicians, public intellectuals and journalists of the day, and such people as the poets S.E.K Mqhayi and Nontsizi Elizabeth Mgqwetho and editor Robert Grendon, contributed to «Abantu-Batho», the shocking fact is that no run of the paper has survived anywhere for scholars to use. What Limb has now done is to bring together a dozen essays on aspects of the paper’s history, and to append to them a 160 page anthology of columns – articles, editorials and letters – from «Abantu-Batho» for every year between 1912 and 1931, fragments of issues of the newspaper found in scattered places on three continents. Tis exercise in recreating a long-lost newspaper involved massive research, for which Limb was able to draw upon the knowledge he accumulated while working on his monograph, published in 2010, on the early years of the ANC, which focused especially on the relationship between the early ANC and black labour and which began to explore the history of the ANC in this period on a local and provincial basis [736] . His chapters in this new book provide much new information about the organisation, especially in relation to its day-to-day activities on the Witwatersrand. One of the chapters in this book, by Robert Vinson, explores relations between the ANC and the Garvey movement in the 1920s, a topic examined in greater depth in another 2012 publication, Vinson’s long-awaited monograph on Garveyism in South Africa [737] . «Abantu-Batho» undoubtedly played an important role in challenging the injustices of South Africa in the years afer 1912 and its partial recreation now is a major achievement, even if much about the paper remains uncertain, including the role played by Queen Labotsibeni of Swaziland, in establishing it, the subject of another chapter in this centennial volume.

734

Killingray D. Signifcant Black South Africans in Britain before 1912: Pan-African Organisations and the Emergence of South Africa's First Black Lawyers // South African Historical Journal. 2012. Vol. 64. No. 3. P. 393–417.

735

The People’s Paper. A Centenary History and Anthology of Abantu-Batho / ed. P. Limb. Johannesburg, 2012.

736

Limb P. Te ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa Before 1940. Pretoria, 2010.

737

Vinson R. T. Te Americans are Coming! Dreams of American Negro Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens, 2012. Te infuence of the Garvey movement partly explains the change of name from SANNC to ANC in 1923.

«The People’s Paper» throws important new light on the relationship between the ANC and other organisations in the early decades afer 1912 and its infuence relative to them. It has of course long been known that in these decades the ANC’s fortunes rose and fell, and that the ANC was ofen eclipsed by other organisations, most notably the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) in the 1920s, but too ofen it and these other organisations have been regarded as discrete and separate entities. In fact, members of the ANC were ofen involved with, and had important infuence on, such other organisations as the ICU and the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), so that no hard and fast lines can be drawn between the ANC and the other organisations with which its history was intimately intertwined. It has also long been known that the ANC, though predominantly moderate and quiescent in this period, also had radical moments, in the immediate afermath of the First World War and in the presidency of J. T. Gumede between 1927 and 1930 [738] . While it may not, therefore, be entirely correct to write, as Tula Simpson does in his Introduction to the special issue of the «South African Historical Journal» on «Te ANC at 100», of «under-acknowledged levels of radicalism» in the movement before 1940s [739] , the new work of Limb, Vinson and others has given us much new detail on those moments of radicalism. Tis work reveals ofen cross-cutting connections between those in favour of a more moderate approach and those who more clearly saw the connections between political and economic power and wished to challenge both. What can be said of the new work is that it has given us a richer and more complex picture of the early decades of the ANC, but there remains ample scope for scholars to use the «Abantu-Batho» anthology, along with other sources, to explore further both the relationship between the ANC and other organisations and the moments of radicalism in the early ANC.

738

The fullest study: Van Diemel R.In Search of Freedom, Free Play and Justice: Josiah Tshangana Gumede, 1867–1947: A Biography. Belhar, 2001.

739

Simpson T. Te ANC at 100 // South African Historical Journal. 2012. Vol. 64. No. 3. P. 382.

2. The Middle decades: c. 1940–1961

Peter Walshe’s Oxford D. Phil thesis became the frst scholarly account of the history of the ANC to be published, as long ago as 1970 [740] . While Walshe surveyed its history from its establishment to 1952, those scholars who began writing about the history of the ANC in the 1970s and the 1980s directed most of their attention to the organisation during the period from its revival in the early 1940s to its banning in 1960, using new sources that had become available by the time they wrote [741] . A key book on this period, though it also moved into the 1970s, was that by Gail Gerhart, a member of the United States-based Gwendolen Carter/Tom Karis team that did so much from the 1960s to save and collect together key documents relating to the history of the ANC. Gerhart focused in her monograph, on the Africanist strand in ANC politics from the Youth League in the 1940s to the breakaway by those who called themselves Africanists in 1958 and beyond [742] . A few years later Tom Lodge, then teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand, published his very infuential book on «Black Politics in South Africa since 1945», which included much on the ANC, at both the national and a local level, before, during and afer the Defance Campaign of 1952, showing that it had «much less internal coherence and much less bureaucratic symmetry than is implied in other preceding accounts» [743] .

740

Walshe P. Te Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa. London, 1970.

741

E.g. much was written about specifc events in which ANC members were involved, such as the Treason Trial of the late 1950s.

742

Gerhart G. Black Power in South Africa. Berkeley, 1978.

743

Lodge T. Refections on

«Black Politics in South Africa» // South African Historical Journal. 2012. Vol. 64. No. 3. P. 496.

In recent years the most prolifc author on these middle years of the ANC has been the American missionary Scott Couper, author of the frst scholarly and detailed biography of Chief Albert Luthuli, President-General from 1952 to his death in 1967. Since publishing his biography, Couper has gone on to defend his arguments about Luthuli’s insistence on non-violence, arguments which he claims are soundly based on a reading of the relevant archives [744] . He has challenged, in my view efectively, what he calls a nationalist interpretation that suggests that Luthuli abandoned his commitment to non-violence in 1961, and was even responsible for giving the name Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) to what became the ANC’s armed wing [745] . In this period of the ANC’s history, when and why some called for a turn to violence becomes a leading question, along with the role of the CPSA and its successor, the underground South African Communist Party (SACP). In an article published in the special issue of the «South African Historical Journal» on the ANC at 100, Irina Filatova shows that before the CPSA dissolved itself in the face of being suppressed in 1950, it had already had signifcant infuence on the ideology of the ANC [746] . Te revival in the CPSA in the early 1940s came before that in the ANC, and the ANC Youth League was in its early years strongly anti-communist. Sisulu and Mandela only gradually shifed their ideological positions. For the infuence of the SACP we can now turn to the work of Stephen Ellis of Leiden, who claims inter aliathat Nelson Mandela was a member of the Central Committee of the SACP in 1960 and that it was the SACP that initiated the creation of MK. In the centenary year of the ANC Ellis has brought out a much revised version of his original co-authored «Comrades Against Apartheid», now entitled «External Mission: the ANC in Exile», in which he argues that the key decision to move to armed struggle was taken at a meeting in December 1960 at which Mandela was present. How important it was, however, that Mandela was then a member of the Central Committee of the SACP remains open to question, as does the role of the SACP in initiating the turn to violence, for as Ellis has himself shown there were many reasons for the change of course, which had more than one origin [747] .

744

Especially see: Couper S. Emasculating Agency: An Unambiguous Assessment of Albert Luthuli’s «Stance on Violence» // South African Historical Journal. 2012. Vol. 64. No. 3. P. 564–586 – a response to an article by Raymond Suttner, entitled «Te Road to Freedom Is via the Cross: Just Means in Chief Albert Luthuli’s Life» (South African Historical Journal. 2010. Vol. 62. No. 4. P. 693–715).

745

This was suggested by Zuma in his 2012 lecture on Luthuli. Cf.: Couper S. Irony upon Irony upon Irony: the Mythologising of Nationalist history in South Africa // South African Historical Journal. 2011. Vol. 63. No. 2. P. 339–346.

746

Filatova I. Te Lasting Legacy: Te Soviet Teory of the National Democratic Revolution and South Africa // South African Historical Journal. 2012. Vol. 64. No. 3. P. 507–537.

747

Cf.: Ellis S. Te genesis of the ANC’s armed struggle in South Africa 1948–1961 // Journal of Southern African Studies. 2011. Vol. 37. No. 4. P. 657–676.

3. The Exile Decades: 1960–1990

How distinct were the decades of exile for the ANC? What was the ANC able to achieve in exile? To what extent was it under the infuence of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and what efect did that infuence, and others, have on the movement? In «External Mission: the ANC in Exile», Ellis admits to being infuenced by his disillusionment with recent developments in the ruling party, and he now repeats, even more strongly than before, the argument originally presented in «Comrades Against Apartheid» that the SACP efectively controlled the ANC in exile. He maintains that the ANC’s links with the Soviet Union were crucial in determining its actions in exile and had signifcant impact on the culture of the organisation, which underwent a very rapid transformation in the early 1960s from mass movement to «sect» [748] . Against this, and the earlier view of Vladimir Shubin that the impetus for the armed struggle came from within the ANC itself and not from the SACP or the Soviet Union [749] , the American historian Paul Landau has, in a detailed examination of the evidence available in South Africa, painted a picture that, to use his own word, is much more «messy» [750] . Tese are issues that are bound to be explored again and again in the future.

748

Cf.: Ellis S. Te genesis of the ANC’s armed struggle in South Africa 1948–1961 // Journal of Southern African Studies. 2011. Vol. 37. No. 4. P. 279.

749

Shubin V. ANC: Te View from Moscow. Cape Town, 1999.

750

Landau P. ANC, MK and the Turn to Violence // South African Historical Journal. 2012. Vol. 64. No. 3. P. 538–563.

In the early 1980s, in the afermath of the Soweto Uprising and the movement into exile of many who had been politicised by that event, the ANC was faced by a crisis in its camps in Angola, where its security department dealt very harshly with those whom it considered spies or enemy agents. Following Paul Trewhela, who pioneered the expose of what had happened in the ANC’s camps in Angola, Ellis puts major emphasis on the destructive role of the Stasi-trained ofcials in the ANC’s Securty Department and emphasises the scale and signifcance of the human rights abuses perpetrated in the camps. An alternative view has been presented by Luli Callinicos, the biographer of the then President-General of the ANC, who has come to Oliver Tambo’s defence in relation to the human rights abuses in the camps in a detailed article in the «South African Historical Journal». In her opinion, Ellis, and before him Trewhela, in challenging the ANC’s own master narrative, with its emphasis on the glory of the armed struggle, and stressing the atrocities committed in the camps, present what she calls a counter-narrative that, in her view, plays down the role of enemy agents in the camps and the context of the apartheid state’s Total Onslaught at the time. Tough she admits that the SACP infuenced the ANC, she points out that the ANC also infuenced the SACP and argues that Ellis’ picture of one-way control is wide of the mark. Landau supports her on this, writing of how «the ANC and MK controlled and contained the SACP, and for many years strategically silenced it altogether in Zambia» [751] . Tere is clearly scope for more work on, say, what Callinicos does not mention, the infuence of the spy scandal in SWAPO on the ANC, for SWAPO’s bases in Angola were close to those of the ANC and the ANC cannot have been ignorance of what SWAPO was doing in Lubango and elsewhere. For all the new insights opened up by Trewhela and now Ellis, they do not provide a balanced account of the exile years. In «External Mission», the great success of the ANC’s diplomatic campaign around the world is downplayed. Ellis has lef it to Hugh Macmillan, Tula Simpson and others to tell the detailed story of the ANC’s role in Zambia, Swaziland and other countries neighbouring South Africa in these decades [752] , and from such work a more balanced view of the ANC’s exile years should emerge in the future [753] .

751

Landau P. Op. cit. P. 562.

752

These include the chapters by Macmillan and Simpson in: Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives / eds. H. Sapire and Ch. Saunders. Cape Town, 2012.

753

We await the publication of major monographs by Hugh Macmillan on the ANC in Zambia, and by Tula Simpson on MK.

Two other key issues of ongoing debate concerning the exile period must be mentioned: the efectiveness of the armed struggle and the extent to which the ANC was able to control events in South Africa itself. Some of the chapters in the relevant volumes of the South African Democracy Education Trust on the struggle in the 1970s and 1980s emphasise both the armed struggle and the links that the ANC had within the country. It is now generally accepted by historians, however, if not always by ANC spokespeople, that the armed struggle was never more than mere armed propaganda, and that the ANC did not instigate the Durban strikes of 1973, the Soweto Uprising in 1976 or the Township Revolt in 1984. In all three cases it was caught unawares by the new resistance in South Africa. Te question of the infuence of the ANC in exile on the United Democratic Front (UDF) within the country in the 1980s is more problematic, given the contacts between Allan Boesak and other leading fgures in the UDF and the ANC leadership in exile [754] . But what is clear is that the one-way infuence that, say, Govan Mbeki tried to draw [755] is not correct, and that the ANC had no efective infuence over much of the internal resistance that took place in South Africa in the 1980s [756] . As a reviewer of Ellis’ book writes: «Te few examples of genuine liberated zones such as Cradock were the product of grass-roots community activism and charismatic leaders such as Matthew Goniwe, with which the exiled ANC had poor links» [757] .

754

Cf.: Seekings J. Te UDF. Cape Town, 2000.

755

Mbeki G. Sunset at Midday. Braamfontein, 1996.

756

Cf.: Janet Cherry’s chapter in: Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa…

757

Merrett Ch. Burden of exile // The Witness. Pietermaritzburg, 2012. 15 October.