Author: Alan Wieder
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
Ruth First and Joe Slovo, husband and wife, were leaders of the war to end apartheid in South Africa. Communists, scholars, parents, and uncompromising militants, they were the perfect enemies for the white police state. Together they were swept up in the growing resistance to apartheid, and together they experienced repression and exile. Their contributions to the liberation struggle, as individuals and as a couple, are undeniable. Ruth agitated tirelessly for the overthrow of apartheid, first in South Africa and then from abroad, and Joe directed much of the armed struggle carried out by the famous Umkhonto we Sizwe. Only one of them, however, would survive to see the fall of the old regime and the founding of a new, democratic South Africa. This book, the first extended biography of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, is a remarkable account of one couple and the revolutionary moment in which they lived. Alan Wieder’s deeply researched work draws on the usual primary and secondary sources but also an extensive oral history that he has collected over many years. By weaving the documentary record together with personal interviews, Wieder portrays the complexities and contradictions of this extraordinary couple and their efforts to navigate a time of great tension, upheaval, and revolutionary hope.
Author: Anthea Jeffrey
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 1868429970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war. Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid. Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be tamed. Violence, once unleashed, is not easy to stamp out. 'Ungovernability', once generated, is not readily reversed. For this new edition, Anthea Jeffery has revised and abridged her seminal work. She has also included a brief overview of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution for which the people's war was intended to prepare the way. Since 1994, the NDR has been implemented in many different spheres. It is now being speeded up in its second and more radical phase.
Author: William Mervin Gumede
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 1770225463
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
As a spokesman for a country, a continent and the developing world, Thabo Mbeki played a crucial role in world politics, but to many people he remained an enigma throughout his presidency. Is this simply because he was a secretive man, or were there complicated political factors at play? Who was the real Mbeki? In this book, multiple-award-winning journalist William Mervin Gumede chronicles Mbeki’s spectacular rise to dominate Africa’s oldest liberation movement. He explores the complex position that Mbeki occupied – following in Nelson Mandela’s footsteps, holding together an alliance with deep ideological differences, and ruling an intensely divided country. Revealing the political and personal tensions behind the scenes, Gumede explains how Mbeki sought to mould the ANC into his image through tight control, and exposes the intrigues behind the battle for succession. Covering Mbeki’s attempts to modernise the economy and kick-start an African Renaissance, and investigating his controversial stance on issues from AIDS to Zimbabwe, the book offers invaluable insights into the arcane machinations behind political decisions that touch the lives of millions every day.
Author: Ronnie Kasrils
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781990263415
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
We hear for the first time from the international issue secretly worked for the INC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe(MK), in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule. They acted as couriers, provided safe houses in neighbouring states and within South Africa, helped infiltrate combatants across borders, and smuggles tonnes of weapons into the country in the most creative ways. Driven by a spirit of international solidarity, they were prepared to take huge risks and face great danger. The internationalists reveal what motivated them as volunteers, not mercenaries: they gained nothing for their endeavours save for the self-esteem in serving a just cause. Against such clandestine involvement, the book includes contributions from key people in the international Anti-Apartheid Movement and its public mobilisation to isolate the apartheid regime. These include worldwide campaigns like Stop the Sports Tours, boycotting of South African products and black American solidarity. The Cuban, East German and Russian contributions outlined those countries' support for the ANC and MK. The public, global Anti-Apartheid Movement campaigns provide the dimensions from which internationalists who secretly served MK emerged. Edited by Ronnie Kasrils. First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2021, ISBN: 978-1-4314-3202-8, this Daraja Press edition is available in North America and East Africa. "The most important take-away is Kasrils' own deep understanding that internationalism means that no struggle, no cause, is really of 'another' " - Phyllis Bennis "This book is a rallying cry. Today, we need the likes of Ronnie Kasrils and his comrades more than ever."- John Pilger "A must-read for humankind who need to be constantly aware of the power and morality of international solidarity in action." - Mavuso Msimang "... how beautiful their stories of idealism, ingenuity and courage, related with evocative detail and unusual modesty in this wondrous and heart-warming book.' - Albie Sachs, Retired Judge, Human Rights Activist "To read this book is both to remember the past and to recognise what needs to be built in the present."-Vijay Prashad, director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
Author: Jacob Dlamini
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190277383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
"In 1986 'Comrade September', a charismatic ANC operative and popular MK commander, was abducted from Swaziland by the apartheid security police and taken across the border. After torture and interrogation, September was 'turned' and before long the police had extracted enough information to hunt down and kill some of his former comrades. September underwent changes that marked him for the rest of his life: from resister to collaborator, insurgent to counter-insurgent, revolutionary to counter-revolutionary and, to his former comrades, hero to traitor. Askari is the story of these changes in an individual's life and of the larger, neglected history of betrayal and collaboration in the struggle against apartheid. It seeks to understand why September made the choices he did - collaborating with his captors, turning against the ANC, and then hunting down his comrades - without excusing those choices. It looks beyond the black-and-white that still dominates South Africa's political canvas, to examine the grey zones in which South Africans - combatants and non- combatants - lived." -- Publisher.
Author: Daniel L. Douek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1849048800
Category : Counterinsurgency
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
South Africa's transition to democracy took place against a backdrop of shadow war between the apartheid regime's counterinsurgency forces and the African National Congress' armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). This book analyses in unprecedented detail the hidden history of MK's struggle and its contribution to South Africa's liberation, while exposing new dimensions of clandestine apartheid-era violence. Drawing on interviews with former MK guerrillas, Daniel Douek traces the evolution of MK's operations across southern Africa from the 1960s, culminating in the 1990-4 negotiations between the ANC and the white supremacist regime. As political violence escalated, the battle waged in the shadows became nothing less than a struggle to shape South Africa's future. Counterinsurgency forces recruited spies, deployed death squads, engaged in psychological warfare, and targeted ANC leaders, including MK chief Chris Hani. Even once ANC elites had come to power, apartheid counterinsurgency operations continued to undermine South Africa's new democracy by marginalizing MK guerrillas within the 'new' security forces, leaving legacies of violence and instability still felt today.
Author: Ken Keable
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780850366556
Category : Anti-apartheid movements
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
ANC members found it very difficult to escape police surveillance after the Rivonia trial ... in 1963-64. But white people from outside South Africa - being unknown and unsuspected - could move about freely to do things for the ANC. London Recruits tells of the secret work they did: how they were recruited, their activities in South Africa and neighbouring countries, their motives and how they feel about it in retrospect."--Back cover
Author: Gary Kynoch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781847012128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A powerful re-reading of modern South African history following apartheid that examines the violent transformation during the transition era and how this was enacted in the African townships of the Witwatersrand. In 1993 South Africa state president F.W. de Klerk and African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime". Yet, while bothdeserved the plaudits they received for entering the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid, the four years of negotiations preceding the April 1994 elections, known as the transition era, were not "peaceful" they were the bloodiest of the entire apartheid era, with an estimated 14,000 deaths attributed to politically related violence. This book studies, for the first time, the conflicts between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party that took place in South Africa's industrial heartland surrounding Johannesburg. Exploring these events through the perceptions and memories of combatants and non-combatants from war-torn areas, along with security force members, politicians and violence monitors, offers new possibilities for understanding South Africa's turbulent transition. Challenging the prevailing narrative which attributes the bulk of the violence to a joint state security force and IFP assault against ANC supporters, the author argues for a more expansive approach that incorporates the aggression of ANC militants, the intersection between criminal and political violence, and especially clashes between groups alignedwith the ANC. Gary Kynoch is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University. He has written one previous book, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999 (OhioUniversity Press, 2005). Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
Author: Stephen Ellis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199365296
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
Nelson Mandela's release from prison in February 1990 was one of the most memorable moments of recent decades. It came a few days after the removal of the ban on the African National Congress; founded a century ago and outlawed in 1960, it had transferred its headquarters abroad and opened what it termed an External Mission. For the thirty years following its banning, the ANC had fought relentlessly against the apartheid state. Finally voted into office in 1994, the ANC today regards its armed struggle as the central plank of its legitimacy. External Mission is the first study of the ANC's period in exile, based on a full range of sources in southern Africa and Europe. These include the ANC's own archives and also those of the Stasi, the East German ministry that trained the ANC's security personnel. It reveals that the decision to create the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) -- guerrilla army which later became the ANC's armed wing -- as made not by the ANC but by its allies in the South African Communist Party after negotiations with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. In this impressive work, Ellis shows that many of the strategic decisions made, and many of the political issues that arose during the course of that protracted armed struggle, had a lasting effect on South Africa, shaping its society even up to the present day.
Author: Stephen Ellis
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Examines the South African Communist Party and how it took over the leadership of the ANC between 1960 and 1990, during the time when both organisations were banned in South Africa and were forced to establish their headquarters in exile. It also concerns Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the guerilla army set up jointly by both organisations under the overall command of Nelson Mandela. North America: Indiana U Press
