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Published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2013 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za © Hugh Macmillan, 2013 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-14314-0821-4 à Ê>Û> >L iÊ>ÃÊ> Êi L \ Êi *1 Ê Çn £ {Σ{ ä nÇ Ç L Ê Çn £ {Σ{ ä nn {Ê S ÊÊ Set in adobe Garamond 10.5/14pt Cover design by publicidi ee a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
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The Lusak a Years The ANC
in
E xile
in
Z ambia
1963–1994 Hugh Macmillan
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For Monica and John
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Contents
1. Home and exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. The road to freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3. Finding the way home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 4. The Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 5. After Wankie and Sipolilo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 6. The Hani memorandum and its repercussions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 7. On the back burner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 8. From dĂŠtente to Soweto. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 9. Building the headquarters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 10. The Shishita crisis and after. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 11. Work and life in Lusaka in the 1980s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 12. The Kabwe conference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 13. The pilgrimage to Lusaka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 14. Relations with Zambia in the late 1980s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 15. From Dirk Coetzee to Thami Zulu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 16. Towards the end of exile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 17. The culture, legacy and lessons of exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Endnotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Acknowledgments and sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
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Lusaka and its suburbs
Lusaka’s city centre, showing the ANC’s headquarters viii
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(Above) The Wankie campaign (Below) The Sipolilo campaign
ďťż
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ix
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x
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H ome
and exile
C hapter O ne
Home and exile
The truth is always in exile. It must wander. – Baal Shem Tov (Yisroel ben Eliezer), 1698–1760 ‘At one o’clock I was in Lusaka, and at three o’clock I was in Cape Town.’ Thabo Mbeki is describing his return, with other leaders of the ANC, from Zambia to South Africa on 28 April 1990 after 28 years in exile. On the tarmac in Cape Town, he stood beside his father, Govan, who spent 23 years on Robben Island, and wept tears of sadness, not of triumph, for the lost opportunities, the lost years. He wondered ‘why people had to wait for so many years, and so many people dead just to do something as easy as what we are doing … We come, we arrive, we land, they put us in a bus, they drive us to a hotel and that is it.’1 Hilda Bernstein, who, with her husband, Rusty, had spent 26 years in exile in the United Kingdom, reflected similarly, though more bitterly, on the wasted years. After meeting Walter Sisulu and the other recently released leaders of the ANC in Lusaka in January 1990 and Nelson Mandela in Harare in March of that year, she wrote: So the ANC is unbanned, Nelson Mandela is released, and we are back more or less where we were thirty years ago … except that he was then a youthful 41, except there was no State of Emergency, no Terrorism Act, except that Victoria Mxenge, Ruth First, Joe [Gqabi] and hundreds of other anti-apartheid militants inside and outside South Africa were not murdered, except that tens of thousands had not fled into exile, except that 4 million had not been uprooted from their homes and dispersed in desert lands to fit in with apartheid policy, except that all the wisdom, the abilities, the energies, the constructive idealism of thousands of Nelson Mandelas had not yet been thrown away, confined to Robben Island, or killed and lost forever.2 Any study of the ANC in exile has to begin by stressing the homesickness, loneliness, pain, alienation, sense of loss, and the waste of energy and time that were essential features of life for most exiles and for much of the time. As Bernstein makes clear, exile was only one of a variety of ways in which people experienced the oppression of Home and exile
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apartheid. As well as assassination and murder, there were various forms of internal exile, including imprisonment, banishment, banning and house arrest, and, for millions, forced removals from towns and farms. Given the harshness of life under apartheid, there was, as we shall see in the concluding chapter of this book, always a feeling among some of those who remained in South Africa that exiles had chosen the easy way out, that they were guilty of desertion (a word used by Bernstein) and even of cowardice. Exiles themselves often felt guilt, as well as regret, about the parents, wives, husbands and children, as well as siblings, they had left behind. The prospect of death in exile and the inability to attend the funerals of parents at home were the cause of much pain. There is no overarching theory of exile, but it is the theme of many of the greatest stories ever told: from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as described in the Book of Genesis, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, through the captivity of the Jews in Egypt and Babylon, to Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and, in Africa, the Malian epic of Sundiata. In the Zulu epic Emperor Shaka the Great, Raymond Mazisi Kunene, the ANC’s one-time representative in London, drew on his own experience to write of the exile of Nandi and Shaka, and the latter’s patron, Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa, who lamented: How terrible the fate of a man in exile! I am a wanderer roaming in foreign lands. I have earned the name of Dingiswayo, ‘The exiled one’. Life in exile stole my youth. Often I have to salute a low breed of upstarts.3 One literary critic, George Steiner, an Austrian émigré, has written in praise of exile and of the Jewish diaspora with its ‘cross-cultural and transnational visions’, while another, Edward Said, a Palestinian exile, an American resident, and an intensely sceptical nationalist, has warned of the dangers of romanticism. Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.4 2
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Said saw nationalism as an assertion of belonging in the fight to overcome the loneliness of exile, but he provides a salutary warning to historians of nationalist movements in exile. ‘Triumphant, achieved nationalism then justifies, retrospectively as well as prospectively, a history selectively strung together in a narrative form: thus all nationalisms have their founding fathers, their basic, quasi-religious texts, their rhetoric of belonging, their historical and geographical landmarks, their official enemies and heroes.’5 In his view, ‘Exile is sometimes better than staying behind or not getting out, but only sometimes.’ He writes from personal experience of the ‘exile milieu’, ‘where everyone not a blood-brother or sister is an enemy, where every sympathizer is an agent of some unfriendly power, and where the slightest deviation from the accepted group line is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty.’6 But he also quotes with approval the view of Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany in Britain and the United States, that ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’. Said is ready to concede that political exile can confer some benefits. It may enable people to see their homes with detachment and having two homes may give people ‘plurality of vision’.7 Social anthropologists have been aware for a long time that people tend to discover their ethnic identities when they move from the countryside to the town and rub shoulders with people from other groups. Similarly, people who leave home and travel abroad may get a new and clearer view of their own national identity. This is undoubtedly true of the ANC as an organisation, which went into exile in the early 1960s as a multi-racial movement and returned home in the early 1990s as a nonracial movement. This was not, however, a painless transition. *** Most people felt the pain of exile, but not so many expressed it, and even fewer felt it so extremely that they gave up and returned to South Africa ‘prematurely’. Ezekiel Mphahlele, the Drum journalist and novelist, and a semi-detached member of the ANC, taught at the University of Zambia from 1968 to 1970 and earned some opprobrium by returning from the United States to South Africa in 1977. His jaundiced view of exile may have been influenced by his knowledge of in-fighting within the ANC in Lusaka, which reached its peak in 1969 and which is documented in a later chapter of this book. In an interview he said: When I was abroad I felt that the ANC in exile was quite something else. The leaders were there, all right, but the things that they were doing just didn’t seem to me to be important at all. Trivialities like attending conferences of one kind or another, tearing across the world, you know, and getting international Home and exile
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money. Also tribalism was pretty rampant in the exile movement: Xhosa against Zulu against Sotho. I kept saying to myself: back home there had been so much cohesion among us. I mean, nobody ever bothered about these ethnic groupings at all. But in exile, man, the thing just emerged in bold relief.8 These views, which may have been true of exile at a particular moment and in a specific place, found fictional expression in his Zambian, and exile, novel, Chirundu, which was published in South Africa in 1979. One of the characters in the novel, Studs Letanka, who is in prison in Lusaka as a suspected spy because he is not a member of the ANC or the PAC, says to a Zambian fellow prisoner: You are the first person I tell this. I wouldn’t trust any of my countrymen – the colony of refugees we’ve got here – they are all frustrated men. Thought they would march back home in quick time and it’s eight years already since some of them were out – they start scratching themselves and backbiting each other and fighting in taverns because they are afraid to answer back when your people insult them – turning around in circles or deserting – you see how they hate themselves and become mean – how could I confide in anyone all these five years I’ve been here? God, have they got troubles!9 Lewis Nkosi, another Drum writer and novelist with ANC associations and a longerterm resident of Lusaka, where he taught at the university from 1979 to 1987, had a completely different take on exile. In an interview in 2002, he said: I’ve never really written about anything but South Africa, and yet I’ve never really experienced the illness that certain people talk about, the illness of what is called homesickness; and it is really a sickness. I sometimes miss the sea and the Indian Ocean, and how my people sing and so on but I’ve never really had this experience of homesickness because I’ve always found other writers, other artists, other places which quickly become home to me.10 In a later interview, he said that when you leave home as a young man, as he did, you start off looking forward to … that sense of freedom, which allows you to break away from a whole lot of things that have inhibited you in your life – and in this country [South Africa] I don’t need to spell out what that was – but it’s strange how even your relatives, your family can in some respects act as a spur to exile. You think that I’d like to move away from here and go somewhere where I can be free to be, as most young people think, free 4
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to be myself even though you don’t know what that self is or what it should be. I was exiled a long time before I left this country. First of all I was exiled because I left for Johannesburg and I thought old Durban is such a boring place. I ought to move away from here and I was glad to get the chance to go to Johannesburg – life seemed to be elsewhere!11 This view of exile was, perhaps, reflected in a song sung all over the world by the ANC’s Amandla cultural group in the 1980s: Sobashiy’ abazal’ ekhaya We will leave our parents at home Saphuma sangena kwamany’ amazwe We go in and out of foreign countries Lapho kungazi khon’ ubaba no mama To places our fathers and mothers don’t know Silandel’ inkululeko We are following freedom Sithi salan’, salan’, salan’ ekhaya We say ‘stay, stay, stay at home’ Sesingena kwamany’ amazwe We are going to foreign countries Lapho kungazi khon’ ubaba no mama To places our fathers and mothers don’t know Silandel’ inkululeko We are following freedom Sobashiy’ abafowethu We will leave our siblings Saphuma sangena kwamany’ amazwe We go in and out of foreign countries Lapho kungazi khon’ ubaba no mama To places our fathers and mothers don’t know Silandel’ inkululeko. We are following freedom.12 Exile and homesickness were, however, killers. The musician Todd Matshikiza, another Drum writer, was in exile in Lusaka with his family from 1964 to 1968, working for Zambia Broadcasting Services and the Zambian department of information’s film unit, and died there in the latter year. His widow, Esmé, described his frustration in London and their excitement at going back to Africa – to Zambia. ‘And we felt Home and exile
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that were back home. Almost. It looks like home, the people look as if they are from home, and everything looks like home there. But it isn’t home [Laughs].’ The Matshikizas got on well with Zambian people, but Todd’s decline, which had begun in London, accelerated after the death of two of his brothers in South Africa. He just couldn’t bear the thought that he was never going to see his brothers again, and maybe that he was never going to see home again. And when he was on his death bed, he just kept imagining that he was back in Queenstown – all the time he was just back home … so he really pined for home, wanted to be back home.13 *** After the banning of the ANC in 1960, Oliver Tambo, the deputy president, established an office for the ‘external mission’ in London. This soon moved to Dar es Salaam and then Morogoro in Tanzania, but the ANC’s external headquarters was located for the longest time in Lusaka. The name of Zambia’s capital became a shorthand identifier for the ANC in exile, as the ‘pilgrimage’ to Lusaka became a feature of internal politics for supporters, critics and even opponents of the ANC in the late 1980s. There was no single ‘culture of exile’, but the relative openness of Zambia had a stronger influence on the ANC than, for example, Angola, where the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) camps were placed in a war zone and were the scene of serious abuses. The location of the headquarters in a country whose leaders professed a kind of Christian socialism, which was close to the ideological core of the ANC itself, was not fortuitous and made for a kind of symbiosis. There were vicissitudes in the relationship between the ANC and Zambia, which often found hosting liberation movements a heavy burden, but Oliver Tambo and Kenneth Kaunda operated on much the same political wavelength and became increasingly close – so much so that Tambo, who had previously moved from one safe house to another, was accommodated from the mid-1980s onwards with Kaunda at State House, the former colonial governor’s residence on Independence Avenue. When Tambo first landed in Zambia in June 1964, he is said to have exclaimed: ‘It’s just like the Transvaal!’14 Writing to his wife, Eleanor, on his first arrival in Lusaka in 1978, Ronnie Kasrils, an MK commander, provided this evocative pen-portrait of the place as seen through the eyes of an exile who had spent time in Tanzania, London and Angola: Physically, it’s like being in South Africa again. I feel at home and elated. The climate is mild unlike the enervating humidity of Dar Es Salaam and Luanda 6
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… jacarandas are in bloom. Then there are the images: Asian shops with Coca-Cola and Vaseline adverts in so-called ‘second class’ business districts: the crowded townships abuzz with hawkers selling everything from boot polish to bananas and single cigarettes; the suburban houses with ‘Beware of the Dog’ signs; walls with jagged glass along the tops to deter ‘kabalalas’ (burglars); South African railway wagons with the SAR-SAS logo in English and Afrikaans; schoolkids in neat European-style uniforms … In other respects this reminds me of a Transvaal dorp (country town) with its small central business area and main road crossing the railway line. Politically things are quite different of course. Zambia is not unaffected by the existence of revolutionary movements in Mozambique and Angola and is smack in the front line struggle against Rhodesia and Pretoria, giving us and ZAPU full support. Politically this country is placed at the strategic crossroads of the battle to liberate Southern Africa and Kaunda is foursquare behind us.15 Kasrils’s political analysis was characteristically optimistic, but there could be little doubt that, as a combination of railway town and garden city on a northern extension of the Highveld, Lusaka was a more suitable place for the ANC’s exile home than Dar es Salaam, Morogoro, Luanda or Maputo. It was, as Thabo Mbeki later described it, a little ambiguously, ‘not quite home’.16 It was relatively easy for members of the ANC to go into exile, though people were sometimes arrested in the attempt, but it proved to be very hard to get back home even though, as Mbeki noted, the journey was in the end so short and so simple. Of course, the truth is that very few people made a conscious decision to go into exile. Most of those who left South Africa in search of military training or further education in the 1960s or 1970s thought that they were leaving the country for only a limited period of time, as Mphahlele noted, and that they would return to South Africa in a year or two. Even those who left on one-way exit permits, as Lewis Nkosi did, believed that they would return home soon. The ‘winds of change’ were blowing through Africa and few people who left would have dreamt that they would not return for 20 or 30 years. As for the leaders of the movement, they did not necessarily choose to leave South Africa. Oliver Tambo was instructed by his comrades to go overseas shortly after the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 in order to lead the ‘external mission’ of the ANC. A few, such as Bram Fischer, the acting chairman of the South African Communist Party (SACP), had the opportunity to leave the country but decided to remain and face imprisonment. As he said in his speech from the dock in 1966: ‘Had I wanted to save myself, I could have done so by leaving the country or simply by remaining in England in 1964 [where he acted in a court case]. I did not do so Home and exile
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because I regarded it as my duty to remain in this country and continue with my work as long as I was physically able to do so.’17 Curiously, there were rumours in 1965 when Fischer was underground in South Africa that he had been seen walking in Lusaka’s Cairo Road with Duma Nokwe and that he was staying at President Kaunda’s farm.18 But for all those who left, exile became a way of life that seemed to have no fixed term. The usual answer to the question ‘how long?’ was ‘we will be home in five years’, but this was a movable date. *** In writing this book I attempt to situate the history of the ANC in exile in the context of the country that was its most important host and to counter the tendency to see exile as a place, an abstract and timeless space. I also seek to counter the widelyheld view that any weaknesses the ANC may display in government today are the product of exile. I have been continuously aware of what Jeremy Cronin has called ‘the sociology of exile, its paranoias and factionalisms’, and what Joe Slovo, as early as 1969, called ‘the disease of exile’. I have been equally aware that, as the late Joe Matthews said in an interview shortly before his death: ‘It is nonsense to equate the culture of the ANC in exile with the story of Quatro Camp.’19 I have tried to take a line between the romantic and the unreasonably hostile views of the ANC in exile. This book is largely based on archival and oral sources, but it is also informed by my own participant observation. I am a witness to some of the events that I describe. Although I have some South African roots, and my father knew most of the founders of the ANC, I have never thought of myself as South African and was never a member of the organisation. I had some contact with ANC exiles, including Joe Matthews, when I was a student in Britain in the 1960s, and first encountered the organisation in Zambia when I visited Jack and Ray Simons in Lusaka in January 1969. I became close to the ANC when I was teaching at the then new university in Swaziland in the mid-1970s. Through my student, Lindiwe Sisulu, later minister of defence and currently of public administration, I met Thabo Mbeki when he arrived in Swaziland early in 1975 to begin work on reviving the ANC underground in South Africa. Our students in Swaziland, like most black students in South Africa, then knew little about the ANC, which had been banned for 15 years, and Black Consciousness was the prevailing political philosophy in the mid-1970s. When Thabo Mbeki challenged me in 1975 in Swaziland, saying, ‘Hugh, you are a typical white liberal. When are you going to come off the fence and join the struggle?’ I replied, ‘Well, if you can persuade me that the ANC is a serious organisation, I might consider doing so.’ That was a reasonable response at that time and he was satisfied with it. He asked me to become a courier soon afterwards, but I did not do much in that line of 8
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work. I saw myself, however, as having been recruited as a helper at that moment in June 1975 and I subsequently spent about 16 years in close proximity to the ANC in exile, for 2 or 3 years in Swaziland, and about 14 years in Zambia. During that time it made up a large part of my political, intellectual and social life. Needless to say, it was much more important to me than I was to it. I make no claims at all for my contribution to the liberation struggle, but I became part of a small social and logistical support network for the ANC in Swaziland and a much larger one in Zambia from 1978 to 1992. My main role, and that of my late wife, Monica, was to provide accommodation for some of the many people who passed through Lusaka and sometimes stayed for months on end, and to provide refuge for those who were often forced to ‘disperse’, to leave their homes at night, owing to the threat of South African attack. I learned in Swaziland that if you met people through the ANC, or even if they came to stay in your house, you did not ask where they came from or what they were doing. If they wanted you to know something they would tell you. The people who ran Operation Vula, the ANC’s most elaborate underground operation, Ivan Pillay and Archie Abrahams (now Whitehead), were in and out of our house in Lusaka all the time in 1988–90, but I had no idea what they were doing. When Operation Vula became public knowledge in July 1990, following the arrest of Mac Maharaj, I asked Archie what it was and was surprised and amused by his reply: ‘You were part of it.’ He reminded me that he had introduced me to someone who, I later discovered, was involved with the proto-email communications they used. He was underground in Lusaka and I had given him an accommodation address. When the ANC began to leave Zambia in 1990 I thought that as a professional historian I should write an account of what I knew about it in Swaziland and Zambia over 15 years. In the course of the following year I wrote a book-length memoir mainly from memory, but also using diaries I had kept between 1977 and 1981 and press cuttings I had collected. I wrote this memoir simply for the record, revised it in 1994, and showed it to a few people, but I had no intention of publishing it. I thought that it was too personal for publication and that my own role was too peripheral to be of any interest to the general reader. At the same time I thought that I was too close to the story to be able to write about it as an academic historian. It was about ten years later that I began to think that I was sufficiently distant from the ANC in exile in Zambia to be able to write an academic account of it. *** I am not, of course, the first person to write about the history of the ANC in exile, though this is the first academic study of the ANC in Zambia or in any one country. Home and exile
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Hilda Bernstein made the first systematic attempt to gather testimonies about the experience of exile in 1989–90. She began work just before the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela, and her book, The rift: The exile experience of South Africans, was published in 1994. With help, she carried out several hundred interviews with South African exiles in Africa, Europe and North America and published a selection of them. The interviews as a whole are an invaluable resource. Other collections have been published including, most recently, Lauretta Ngcobo’s interviews with women who were in exile, Prodigal daughters.20 Another early publication on the ANC in exile was Comrades against apartheid: The ANC and the SACP in exile by Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba (a pseudonym for Oyama Mabandla), which was published in 1992. This exposed some of the excesses of the ANC’s security department in Angola and the mutinies there, but it was marred by a conspiratorial view of history and profound anti-communism, something that makes understanding the ANC in exile difficult. Twenty years later, Ellis, writing alone, published an updated version of the same story under the title External mission: The ANC in exile. Although it is better informed than its predecessor, with access to some of the same archival sources that I have used, the underlying theses about the SACP’s ‘hijack’ of the ANC, and the sinister and controlling influence of Moscow, are the same.21 Ellis has added a new emphasis on factionalism and the criminal connections of the ANC and the apartheid government. The end result is a book which equates the South African government’s murderous ‘third force’ with the ANC’s Operation Vula and comes close to equating the ANC and the apartheid state. The ANC in exile is given little credit for the end of apartheid, which is attributed to internal pressure, international pressure and the collapse of the Soviet Union.22 Among the new book’s more outrageous assertions is that Oliver Tambo ‘was the perfect frontman, since he was not a communist, his manner was disarmingly mild, and he could generally be relied upon to deliver whatever speech was put in front of him by his aides, of whom Thabo Mbeki was the most important’.23 This unsubstantiated statement misrepresents Tambo’s role and underestimates his intellectual strengths and contribution to holding the ANC in exile together over 30 years in the face of a determined onslaught from the infinitely better-resourced apartheid state. Incidentally, it also misrepresents the speech-making partnership between Mbeki and Tambo, as is made clear by comparison with Zanele Mbeki’s description of her husband and Tambo at work on a speech: Thabo and OR [Tambo] would sit talking for hours on end – before speechwriting began. Thabo would mainly be absorbing the gist of OR’s message … OR was very careful with his language. He did not like jargon in his speeches and therefore would not hesitate to return a draft four or 10
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five times for the correction of words and formulations. If inappropriate formulations appeared, the speech would be typed all over again. The ‘delete’ and ‘insert’ technology of the computer age did not exist. The to and fro of draft rewrites required a dedicated team of drivers, typists and proofreaders.24 The two most reliable and accurate published accounts of the ANC in exile are Vladimir Shubin’s ANC: A view from Moscow, which draws on the Soviet archives and also on the author’s own notes of meetings with many of the leaders of the ANC on visits to the Soviet Union between 1969 and 1990, and Tor Sellström’s two-volume Sweden and national liberation in southern Africa, which covers Sweden’s relationship with liberation movements throughout the region and draws on foreign ministry archives and those of the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). It is hardly surprising that the governments that were best informed about the ANC in exile were two of its major donors.25 There are also three major biographies of ANC leaders who spent significant periods of time in Lusaka. Each of them is an excellent book in its own way, but none of them devotes much space to its subject’s life in Zambia. Luli Callinicos’s biography of Oliver Tambo includes a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Family in exile’, but apart from a short account of Tambo’s relationship with President Kenneth Kaunda, and a few pages on the Kabwe conference in 1985, and on the meeting with South African businessmen in the same year, little space is devoted to his life in Zambia.26 Padraig O’Malley’s life of Mac Maharaj, Shades of difference, provides an invaluable account of Operation Vula, but only one of 22 chapters is devoted to life in exile in London and Lusaka.27 In writing his massive and authoritative life of Thabo Mbeki, Mark Gevisser visited Lusaka and made a real effort to understand the place. He acknowledges, however, that it was ‘not easy to get a handle on the ANC’s statewithin-a-state that operated in Lusaka for two decades’. His repeated descriptions of the town in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘torpid’ and ‘sleepy’ confirm that point. Lusaka has changed so much in the 20 years since the end of exile that it has become even more difficult today than it was at the time of Gevisser’s visit to reconstruct the ANC’s life in the city.28 *** Underlying much of the commentary on the malign influence of exile on the ANC in government is hostility to the ANC itself, together with resentment and surprise that a movement that appeared to be so unsuccessful for so long – ‘the world’s oldest and least successful liberation movement’ – could attract and retain for 20 years the support of a substantial majority of South Africa’s population. Howard Barrell, the Home and exile
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author of an unpublished, but important, dissertation on the history of MK from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, posed the essential question when he asked, ‘How did the ANC succeed when it so evidently failed?’ He suggested that the answer lay in its ability to derive a political dividend from military failure – it ‘had dared to struggle against a brutal, powerful, and internationally infamous enemy’.29 The increasing popularity of the ANC inside South Africa in the course of the 1980s did derive in part from a few spectacular military operations, but its ultimate success was the result of its achievement in establishing itself internationally as the most legitimate voice of the voiceless people of South Africa. This was due not so much to its military activities as to a wide variety of efforts in the fields of diplomacy, propaganda and culture, which led to its recognition as the gatekeeper for the external funding and validation of internal movements. It was also due to the way in which Oliver Tambo and other leaders were able to maintain the ANC in exile, in spite of huge difficulties and internal tensions, as a broad church appealing to people across ethnic, racial and class divides. The ANC in exile had many weaknesses and many failings. It was, however, unusual among liberation movements for its level of selfscrutiny and self-criticism. As a leader, Tambo sought consensus and the ANC moved slowly, pursuing a twin-track policy, both military and diplomatic. This began to bear fruit from 1985 onwards when a combination of internal and external pressures led to the opening up of lines of communication between the ANC in Lusaka, its supporters and allies inside South Africa, and the apartheid regime. President Kaunda and the government of Zambia, which had been sceptical since 1969 about armed struggle, supported these developments, and for a time all roads led to and from Lusaka.
12
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T he
road to freedom
C hapter T wo
The road to freedom
A hot leonine wind prowled through the saw grass, rattling the few gaunt thornbushes that dot the banks of the Zambezi River near Kasane. Potbellied kids squatted in the shade of round, white-walled mud huts while their mothers hacked with mattocks in the maize patches. Down at the river bank, ‘Captain’ Nelson Maibolwa puttered with twin 18-h.p. outboard motors slung on a ramshackle wood-and-iron pontoon. Behind him flowed the sun-dappled grey-green Zambezi, where crocodiles, hippos, and shoals of saber-toothed tiger fish eternally wait their prey. There came the sound of a laboring truck engine, and brawny coal-black Captain Nelson peered down the rutted dirt track from the south as proudly as if Emma, Lady Hamilton were being piped aboard the poop deck. It was another load of passengers for his Freedom Ferry.1 The anonymous correspondent of Time Magazine was describing, with an unacknowledged debt to Rudyard Kipling’s Just so stories, the scene on the banks of the Zambezi at Kasane in the Bechuanaland Protectorate in April 1964. The passengers for Captain Nelson’s Freedom Ferry were 28 young South African men who had arrived to cross the river to Northern Rhodesia on their way to Tanganyika and military training elsewhere in Africa. The river crossing at Kazungula, where the Chobe River meets the Zambezi, is the only place in the world where four countries meet at one point. The countries were (in April 1964) the Bechuanaland Protectorate (soon to be Botswana), Northern Rhodesia (soon to be Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (soon to be Rhodesia, and later Zimbabwe), and South West Africa (later Namibia). When the ferry crossed the Zambezi, which is about 400 metres wide at this point, it passed close to an island at the eastern tip of the Caprivi Strip, which was to remain under South African control for a further 26 years. Before reaching Kazungula, the young men had travelled in an open truck for more than 500 kilometres along a dirt track through the Kalahari from Francistown. The journey was only possible in the dry season and took several days – elephants sometimes blocked the road, lions could be seen and heard, and game animals were often shot for the pot. The route had first been used by parties of ANC recruits at the end of 1962. It enabled them to bypass Southern Rhodesia, but, until the dissolution The road to freedom
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of the settler-controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland at the end of 1963, they could only pass clandestinely through Northern Rhodesia with the help of the local nationalist parties. Many future leaders of the South African ANC, who feature in this book, including Johnny Makatini, who became head of international affairs, Archie Sibeko, prominent in MK and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), Zola Skweyiya, later a lawyer and a member of the ANC constitution committee, and Chris Hani, a hero of the Wankie campaign and later chief of staff of MK, passed this way, but they were unable to stay long in Northern Rhodesia. Some, like Thabo Mbeki in 1962, were turned back before they could enter Northern Rhodesia and went on by air from Bechuanaland to Tanganyika. Other less fortunate people, including Joe Gqabi and Henry ‘Squire’ Makgothi, reached Northern Rhodesia, but were sent back to South Africa, where they served long prison terms. The links between the ANC and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia went back to its establishment as the South African Native National Congress in 1912. The new congress was then seen as a regional organisation and its honorary presidents included several paramount chiefs, or kings, from outside the boundaries of South Africa. Among them was one from north of the Zambezi, King Lewanika, the still quasi-independent ruler of Barotseland. One of his younger sons, Godwin Mbikusita Lewanika, was the first president of Northern Rhodesia’s African National Congress when it was set up in 1948. The ANC’s president, Chief Albert Luthuli, corresponded with Northern Rhodesia’s ANC in 1956–7, but the two congresses were soon preoccupied by their own internal dissensions, which resulted in the splitting away from the South African ANC of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) under the leadership of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, and from the Northern Rhodesian ANC of the Zambia ANC (ZANC) under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda. After its banning by the colonial government in 1959, the latter party re-emerged as the United National Independence Party (UNIP, pronounced ‘you nip’), which was to lead Northern Rhodesia through the break-up of the Federation at the end of 1963 to independence as Zambia in October 1964. Nelson Mandela, the underground commander of MK, which had been set up as an autonomous organisation by the ANC and the SACP in July 1961 and had launched a sabotage campaign on 16 December, left South Africa clandestinely through Bechuanaland in January 1962 to attend the meeting of the Pan African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (known as PAFMECSA) in Addis Ababa. It was an important part of his mission to seek funds and military training facilities for MK recruits in independent Africa. In Tanganyika on the way, and at the meeting in Ethiopia, he had his first encounters with the two leaders who were to be the ANC’s most important hosts over the next 30 years. He found that Julius Nyerere, the leader of TANU (the Tanganyika African National Union) and 14
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of recently independent Tanganyika, and Kenneth Kaunda, the leader of UNIP, were both sympathetic towards the ANC, but their supporters were impressed by the apparent radicalism of the PAC. In his memoir, Long walk to freedom, Mandela recalled his first meeting with Kaunda and his friend and later deputy, Simon Kapwepwe. He wrote: Oliver [Tambo] and I had a private discussion with Kenneth Kaunda … Like Julius Nyerere, Kaunda was worried about the lack of unity among South African freedom fighters and suggested that when Sobukwe emerged from jail, we might all join forces. Among Africans the PAC had captured the spotlight at Sharpeville in a way that far exceeded their influence as an organization. Kaunda … told us he was concerned about our alliance with white communists and indicated that this reflected poorly upon us in Africa. This view came as something of a revelation to me, and it was a view that I was to hear over and over during my trip. When I attempted to make the case that UNIP’s support of the PAC was misguided, Kaunda put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Nelson, speaking to me on this subject is like carrying coals to Newcastle. I am your supporter and a follower of Chief Luthuli. But I am not the sole voice of UNIP. You must speak to Simon Kapwepwe. If you persuade him, you will make my job easier.’ … I spent the entire day with Kapwepwe and heard from him the most astonishing tale. ‘We were mightily impressed by your speech’, he said, ‘and indeed by your entire ANC delegation. If we were to judge your organization by these two things, we would certainly be in your camp. But we have heard disturbing reports from the PAC to the effect that Umkhonto we Sizwe is the brainchild of the Communist Party and the Liberal Party, and that the idea of the organization is merely to use Africans as cannon fodder.’ I was nonplussed, and I blurted out that I was astounded that he could not see himself how damnably false this story was. ‘First of all,’ I said, ‘it is well known that the Liberal Party and the Communist Party are arch-enemies and could not come together to play a game of cards. Second, I am here to tell you at the risk of immodesty that I myself was the prime mover behind MK’s formation.’ Finally, I said I was greatly disappointed in the PAC for spreading such lies. By the end of the day, I had converted Kapwepwe, and he said he would call a meeting and make our case himself – and he did so. But it was another example both of the lack of knowledge about South Africa in the rest of Africa and the extraordinary lengths the PAC would go to besmirch the ANC.2 The road to freedom
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Mandela’s later recollection of his meetings with the leaders of UNIP is not entirely consistent with his contemporary diary or the report he submitted to the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) on his return to South Africa in July 1962. According to his diary, he had one meeting with Kaunda and Kapwepwe in Addis Ababa, another with Kaunda, in company with Tambo, in the same place, and a lengthy meeting two or three weeks later in Cairo with Reuben Kamanga, UNIP’s deputy president.3 In his later memoir Mandela confused Kamanga and the betterknown Kapwepwe. It was Kamanga with whom he had the long meeting and it was he who told him that unnamed people, presumably Northern Rhodesian nationalists, had torn up the ANC’s Freedom Charter when they heard that it had been written ‘under Communist influence’.4 Although Mandela’s speech to the conference was well received, he was concerned about the sympathy for the PAC, the lack of understanding of the multi-racial Congress Alliance, and the hostility towards the ANC’s alliance with the SACP. He was surprised that the ANC could be accused simultaneously of communism and liberalism, but noted that there was ‘widespread anti-white feeling and violent opposition to anything that smacks of … partnership between black and white’ in the region. It was also clear that ‘there are great reservations about our policy and there is a widespread feeling that the A.N.C. is a Communist dominated organisation’. He noted that ‘the mere allegation that you are a stooge is of itself so damaging that it must automatically discredit the A.N.C.’ and it did no harm to any politician in Africa ‘to be called a racialist or anti-white’. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chief Luthuli had ‘created the impression that Luthuli has been bought by the West’. Some of Luthuli’s statements had been ‘extremely unfortunate’ and ‘had created the impression of a man who is a stooge of whites’. There were many people in the region who said that the PAC might be naïve, but that it is ‘the only organisation in South Africa that is in step with the rest of Africa’.5 There was no formal alliance between the ANC and the SACP, but after the banning of the ANC there was a temporary blurring of the boundaries between the two organisations, which were driven into closer cooperation in conditions of illegality. Moses Kotane and J.B. Marks were long-time leaders of both organisations. Among the other leaders of the ANC, Walter Sisulu joined the SACP in 1955 and was co-opted onto the central committee in the following year, while Nelson Mandela may have been co-opted onto the committee in 1960–1. He has always denied, however, that he ever became a communist and there is no compelling reason to believe that he did. It suited both sides that MK should be at least nominally autonomous, because there was less than unanimous support from the members of the two groups for the launch of a sabotage campaign. Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC’s president, and Moses Kotane, the SACP’s general secretary, were either opposed to or sceptical 16
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about the campaign. Mandela and Sisulu both attended a national conference of the SACP near Johannesburg in December 1960, which approved a resolution calling for the setting up of military units with a view to preparing for what Rusty Bernstein described as ‘armed struggle’ and another participant, Bob Hepple, describes as ‘armed propaganda’. According to Bernstein, this was ‘no more than an interim decision’, which was referred to the SACP central committee. It was not until July 1961 that MK was formally established by the two organisations.6 Mandela was clearly surprised by the opposition that he encountered among Northern Rhodesian, Tanganyikan and other African nationalists to the ANC’s alliance with communists. There were various reasons for this hostility, including awareness of the recent Sino-Soviet split, the reluctance of these newly independent, or about-to-be independent states, to be drawn into the Cold War, and their determination to remain as far as possible non-aligned. It was clear that Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia would not welcome an overt communist presence. It was equally clear that they were the two countries on which the ANC would be most dependent for access to the north and to the outside world, as well as for the return of trained men (and, at that date, a few women) to South Africa. On his return to South Africa in July 1962 after six months in Africa and Western Europe, Mandela told his colleagues in the ANC’s National Working Committee that there was a need for a change of tactics. In his memoirs he recalled: Still ringing in my ears was my final meeting with the Zambian leaders, who told me that while they knew the ANC was stronger and more popular than the PAC, they understood the PAC’s pure African nationalism but were bewildered by the ANC’s non-racialism and communist ties. I informed them that Oliver [Tambo] and I believed that the ANC had to appear more independent to reassure our new allies on the continent, for they were the ones who would be financing and training Umkhonto we Sizwe. I proposed reshaping the Congress Alliance so that the ANC would clearly be seen as the leader, especially on issues directly affecting Africans. He insisted that ‘our friends’, by which he meant the SACP and the other members of the Congress Alliance, ‘must understand that it is the ANC that is to pilot the struggle’. Moses Kotane, the general secretary and the most senior member of the SACP, agreed that the ANC ‘should stand on its own outside’ and that ‘there would have to be some modification of the way of cooperation inside’. Duma Nokwe, secretary-general of the ANC, said that they must take a realistic view of the situation in Africa and agreed that ‘[if] the cause of the struggle in SA can only be put forward through the ANC then we must do so’.7 The road to freedom
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Kotane and Marks soon left South Africa and became the leading representatives of the ANC in Dar es Salaam. They required, in line with the decision that had been made in the presence of Mandela in 1962, that there should be no distinct SACP representation in Africa and that it should not be allowed to organise within the ANC in exile in Africa. It was not until after Kotane withdrew to the Soviet Union following a stroke in 1968 and after the Morogoro conference in 1969 that the ANC allowed the SACP to organise small groups in Zambia and Tanzania, and it was not until the late 1970s that the party began to organise clandestinely within MK.8 The SACP was never recognised in these countries as a separate liberation movement and was never able to hold public meetings in either of them. *** The dissolution of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland on 31 December 1963 and the establishment after pre-independence elections of a UNIP government with Kenneth Kaunda as prime minister came at an opportune time and allowed for the free and unimpeded flow of refugees, recruits or ‘students’ from South Africa through Northern Rhodesia to Tanganyika. About 290 men and 20 women passed through between December 1963 and June 1964.9 Although the UNIP–ANC coalition government of Northern Rhodesia had not been keen to allow refugees from the south to settle in the country, it had permitted Sam Masemola, one of the accused in the Treason Trial in 1956, to stay in Lusaka for much of 1963 as an ANC representative. The pre-independence UNIP government, which took office on its own in January 1964, allowed a higher and more permanent level of ANC representation. Thomas Nkobi, who had studied at Pius XII University College in Basutoland and was national organising secretary of the ANC at the time of its banning, moved to Lusaka from Dar es Salaam early in 1964 and became its chief representative. His wife, Winifred Mangoane Moroka, a midwife who was to work for many years at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, and their children joined him at the end of the year. They took a house in the medium-density suburb of Lilanda and lived there for the next 26 years.10 Duma Nokwe, a Fort Hare graduate and an advocate, also spent a good deal of time in Lusaka during 1964. His wife, Vuyiswa ‘Tiny’, another Fort Hare graduate, arrived in Lusaka with their children in January 1965 and stayed for 25 years, working at first for an Israeli agricultural machinery company and then as a secondary school teacher. Tennyson Makiwane, a young Fort Hare graduate and journalist, from a distinguished Eastern Cape family, also arrived in Lusaka from Dar es Salaam in 1964 and was to remain there with his wife and family for more than a decade.11 Oliver Tambo made his first visit to Lusaka in June 1964, flying in from Dar es Salaam 18
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via Blantyre in Nyasaland, which was due to become independent as Malawi in the following month.12 Kenneth Kaunda made a number of statements about South Africa in the months before independence. In January 1964, he delivered a speech in Broken Hill (now Kabwe) in which he offered to exchange ambassadors with the Republic of South Africa on condition that the staff of a Zambian mission should be treated with the same respect as members of a European embassy and that they should not be subjected to the ‘indignities of apartheid ’. He justified his offer in an interview with the Johannesburg newspaper The Star: I find myself obsessed with the tremendous problem of South Africa. If bloodshed really does begin in South Africa, it would have a ghastly effect, not only within the Republic itself, but throughout the whole continent of Africa. I have searched my heart for a new approach to help all South Africans to solve their problems peacefully. In my opinion, the present is the most critical psychological moment to show there is understanding and sympathy for the people of South Africa.13 In an indirect response to Kaunda, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African prime minister, indicated in an interview with the novelist Stuart Cloete that there was no question of South Africa accepting a Zambian ambassador, though it might consider a roving ambassador to represent all the independent African states. Cloete commented: ‘In this respect Dr Verwoerd remains a man of granite. He will not be moved from his ideals. He is convinced that Africa will come to terms with him and will have to live with South Africa. He is convinced that this is the only course for Africa to follow.’14 At the conclusion of the Rivonia Trial in July 1964, when Nelson Mandela and the other convicted defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, Kaunda offered South Africa ‘what amounted to a pact of mutual non-aggression’. He sent a cable to President Swart ‘asking that he commute their sentences to exile in Zambia, in return for which I would give an assurance that I would not allow our country to be used as a base for subversive activity against the Republic’. It was a matter of disappointment to Kaunda that both these offers were met with ‘total silence from Pretoria’.15 *** Zambia’s formal achievement of independence on 24 October 1964 did not result in any dramatic change in the government’s attitude towards political refugees. Liaison with the leaders of what would now be called the liberation movements – they were The road to freedom
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then described as ‘nationalist organisations’ – rested with the Office of the President, with some input from the ministry of foreign affairs. Peter Mackay, who was working with the International Refugee Council of Zambia, recalls with some sympathy the ambivalent approach of the Zambian government towards the flow of refugees from its troubled neighbours. Writing 40 years later he recalled: Zambia quite properly wished to consolidate its sovereignty as an independent state, and this required it to assert the nationalism that had brought the state into being … Obligations to refugees under international law could be heeded and the legalities observed, but human warmth was not among the obligations, nor could concern to find a better world for the waifs of exile be introduced to stern statutes and impersonal rubber stamps.16 Zambia’s support for the liberation movements meant that it was easier to get entry to the country for people who owed allegiance to them than it was for the unattached, but ‘we had to recognise that Zambia was in a difficult position and was still groping for a line somewhere between its obligations – moral to Africa’s nationalists, legal in international practice – and its national stability, while we ourselves were groping with the contradictions of our own position’.17 According to Peter Mackay, his organisation was dealing with 12 liberation movements and refugees from eight countries in Zambia in the mid-1960s. Apart from refugees from countries under colonial rule, there were also refugees from three countries, the Congo, Sudan and Malawi, which had recently attained independence. The new government feared that it might be overwhelmed by a flood of asylumseekers, and felt some tension between its moral obligation to countries that were fighting to free themselves from colonial rule and the need to ensure its own stability and development.18 In what some saw as a deliberate warning shot, South African agents violently abducted from Lusaka within days of independence a British citizen, Dennis Higgs, who had been an explosives expert for the Armed Resistance Movement, a group of mainly white radicals with links to the Liberal Party. He was snatched from his house in Lusaka, bundled into a caravan in a drugged state, and driven by road to Johannesburg. After strong protests from the British government he was returned to Lusaka and was then immediately flown out to London.19 The government moved quickly to regulate the activities of exile organisations in Lusaka. They were informed that they could not have more than six permanent staff and that they must not operate more than ten miles from Lusaka without permission. President Kaunda appointed Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a UNIP security official and a military veteran, as director of an ‘Africa Liberation Centre’ where representatives of these organisations would be obliged to have offices. It was not until October 1965 20
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that the centre was set up in a group of prefabricated buildings at the Charter Welfare Hall in Kamwala Township.20 Nkoloso was an eccentric character who had run for office as mayor of Lusaka and launched a fanciful or bizarre ‘space programme’, which has brought him posthumous fame.21 He took his duties seriously and represented the liberation movements effectively until his retirement in 1972.22 Not long before Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in November 1965, the Zambian government issued new instructions to the liberation movements: they should not under any circumstances recruit Zambian nationals or foreign residents to their organisations without official permission. The latter prohibition was aimed at the Rhodesian liberation movements, which were accused of press-ganging local residents into their armed wings. Foreign nationals passing through Zambia for training abroad should comply with the immigration laws and the country could not be used as a military base by people who had received military training elsewhere.23 The Zimbabwean organisations in Lusaka were the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), represented by Josiah Tongogara, who was reputed to have worked as a waiter in a local hotel, and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), represented by its deputy president, James Robert Chikerema, and its secretary-general, George Nyandoro. The members of the executive in Lusaka included J.Z. Moyo, Edward Ndlovu and T.G. Silundika, and their military lieutenants, Dumiso Dabengwa and Akim Ndlovu who acquired a 20-acre plot, known as ‘Camp C’, about 15 kilometres from Lusaka, and launched an armed wing in 1965.24 The ANC was by no means the most important liberation movement in Zambia in the 1960s. It was one of nine officially recognised ‘nationalist organisations’ and one of three South African organisations in Zambia – the other two were the PAC, which was already troubled by factionalism, and the All Africa Convention (or Unity Movement), which, though tiny, was also riven by internal conflicts. It was represented by I.B. Tabata and his partner Jane Gool. The other movements in Lusaka included Angola’s MPLA and FNLA, Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and Mozambique’s FRELIMO.25 Jonas Savimbi, who became the leader of UNITA when it broke away from the FNLA in 1966, was present in Lusaka until his expulsion from the country in 1967. UNITA’s office was ‘in the ramshackle backroom of a building’ in the sanitary lane between Cairo Road and Cha Cha Cha Road, the same area as the ANC’s later headquarters.26 *** The organised flow of recruits from South Africa to the north for MK continued throughout the first half of 1964. It is likely that 400 men and a few women moved The road to freedom
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north in that year to add to the 200 or so recruits who had used the overland route in 1962–3 and to another 200 or so people who had bypassed Northern Rhodesia and been flown out from Bechuanaland to Tanganyika in the same period. This total of about 800 men and women who had moved north for military training in 1962–4 tallies more or less exactly with Howard Barrell’s estimate that MK had about 800 ‘trainees’ in camps in Tanzania, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union or elsewhere in 1965.27 The chief representative of the ANC in Lusaka at independence on 24 October 1964 was Thomas Nkobi; his deputy was Tennyson Makiwane, who replaced him in January 1965. Nkobi’s demotion came about as a result of the NEC’s embarrassment at his arrest and appearance in court on a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol. He believed that he had been ‘set up’ by Makiwane, who plied him with drink and reported his misdemeanour to headquarters in Dar es Salaam.28 Nkobi remained in Lusaka as deputy representative and was restored to his position as chief representative after the temporary departure of Makiwane in 1969. Official representation soon grew to the statutory limit of six members with the arrival of Memory Miya, a SACTU official; Ulysses Modise, publicity secretary; Johannes TauTau; and Chris Nkosana, administrative secretary. Nkosana was the MK name of Martin Thembisile Hani, who is better known as Chris Hani. He was only 23 when he arrived in Lusaka and had already completed a degree in Latin and English at Fort Hare and a year’s military training in the Soviet Union. He was to play a significant role over the next two years as secretary of the committee that was set up to organise the return ‘home’ of trained military personnel.29 By the second half of 1965 there was a small number of MK men in Lusaka, who are often referred to in contemporary documents as ‘students’, ‘boys’ or ‘mates’. There was by then a small-holding at Kaluwa’s, east of Lusaka, which was later used as one of two or three holding places for MK personnel. Nkobi was then running two bank accounts, an administrative account and an MK account, and asked headquarters for similar amounts of money for each of them.30 There was a class distinction in the allowances paid to different categories of people, with senior officials paid £35–45 a month, which was not then a large salary, but was enough to live on. Chris Hani received £35 a month, as did Michael Dingake, who was based in Bechuanaland but paid from Lusaka. Johannes Tau-Tau and Ulysses Modise received only £8 a month, while the MK ‘boys’ were kept in a house in Lilanda and were given food and a small cash allowance.31 How did these officials pass their time? Livingstone Mqotsi, a highly educated member of the Unity Movement who worked fulltime as a secondary-school teacher, thought that officials of his and other movements soon got bored with a daily round of visits to embassies, seeking funds and diplomatic support.32 The ANC officials may not have been fully employed, but they were the new front line and put a 22
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good deal of effort into maintaining the network in Bechuanaland, which was the main means of communication between what remained of the underground inside South Africa and the headquarters, which had by then moved from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro. Although the dispatch of ‘students’ from South Africa had come to an end in the later months of 1964, individuals and occasional small groups continued to make their way through Bechuanaland to Zambia. *** Meanwhile, the ANC was beginning to make itself at home in Lusaka, which has today a population of about 2 million and has spread out for many kilometres in all directions; but in 1964 it was a relatively small, though rapidly growing, town. On the Great East Road, for example, there was still open bush a couple of kilometres from the city centre beyond the show grounds and the suburb of Olympia Park in the area where parliament and the university were about to be built and the suburbs of Roma and Kalundu were soon to appear. The population was about 120,000 in 1963, 250,000 in 1969, 500,000 in 1980, and perhaps 1 million in 1990. The white population in the mid-1960s was only about 7,000 and the Asian population about 3,000, but the town still bore the marks of colonial segregation, with the lowdensity suburbs predominantly white and the medium- to high-density ‘compounds’ (townships or locations in South African parlance) overwhelmingly African, which they remain. In the city centre, and the main shopping streets of Cairo Road and Livingstone and Stanley roads (soon to be renamed Cha Cha Cha Road and Freedom Way), Asian traders were taking over shops that had been run by Jewish traders since the foundation of the town. The Nkobis and Nokwes and their younger associates moved into the mediumdensity suburbs of Lilanda and Matero, which lay two or three kilometres to the north-west of Cairo Road. The quality and density of housing were similar to those of the townships of Johannesburg’s Soweto, though the scale of the settlements was much smaller. The colonial government had been ruthless in its demolition of squatter camps and ‘shanty compounds’, but the new government adopted a more humane approach. Over the next 25 years the ANC community in Lusaka was to grow with the city and was eventually scattered throughout the medium-density compounds and the low-density areas, though it generally avoided the burgeoning ‘shanty compounds’.33 These ANC pioneers developed social networks, which included members of other southern African liberation movements, especially ZAPU and SWAPO, and which did not always exclude members of rival South African movements, such as the PAC, until its expulsion in 1968, and the Unity Movement. They also The road to freedom
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included members of the government, such as Sikota Wina, Elijah Mudenda and Dr Mashekwa Nalumango, who had been at university in South Africa. Mudenda and Nalumango had South African wives, as had Reuben Kamanga, vice-president at independence and later foreign minister. There was also a network of black South Africans who had come to work as teachers. They included Hugh Africa, headmaster of Monze secondary school in the mid-1960s, who went on to work at the University of Zambia and at the United Nations Institute for Namibia; Samuel Molotsi, who became headmaster of a Lusaka secondary school; and Winchi Njobe, who arrived in the late 1960s and became vice-principal of the Natural Resources Development College. There were lawyers with ANC connections, such as George Chaane and Ebe Gani, and doctors, including David Levitt and Malizo Mpehle, brother of Mtutu Mpehle of the Unity Movement, who worked as a gynaecologist at the University Teaching Hospital until the late 1980s. The most conspicuous black South African expatriates in Lusaka after independence were Todd Matshikiza and Ezekiel (Es’kia) Mphahlele, who have already been mentioned. Bernard (also known as Ben) Magubane, a sociologist, spent three years from 1967 to 1970 at the university, but was compelled to leave as a result of regulations that denied work permits to stateless refugees and made no allowance for the problems of South Africans. He was an active member of the ANC and was a delegate from Lusaka to the Morogoro conference in 1969 and from the United States to the Kabwe conference in 1985. He was later an editor of the South African Democratic Education Trust’s important history of the liberation struggle, The road to democracy in South Africa. He and his wife provided a safe house to Oliver Tambo for most of a year before they left for the United States. Other South Africans in Lusaka with ANC connections included Nat Masemola, who became town clerk. Liberal Party members included Trevor Coombe, an educationist, and Tim Holmes, former editor of Contact, teacher, poet and author. There was also a black South African expatriate community, and an ANC committee, on the Copperbelt, which was a significant source of local funds.34 Lusaka was also home to a small group of white radicals who played an important role in support of the ANC in the 1960s and later. The most conspicuous were Simon and Cynthia Zukas and Harry and Marjorie Chimowitz. Simon Zukas arrived in Northern Rhodesia from Lithuania in 1938 as a teenager and after wartime service studied civil engineering at the University of Cape Town. He was deported to Britain in 1952 after playing a leading part in the opposition to the Federation. He was an active supporter, with his South African wife Cynthia, of UNIP in London and on their return to Zambia in 1965. Harry Chimowitz, a Southern Rhodesian, had also studied in Cape Town and became a partner with Zukas in a civil engineering business in London and Lusaka. Also close to the ANC were Barney Gordon, who 24
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had been a trade unionist in South Africa and ran a clothing business in Lusaka, and his wife, Sonia. They were friends of Simon Kapwepwe and were deported in 1971. Although it was alleged that they were agents of the German Democratic Republic, their real offence was their closeness to Kapwepwe.35 The Zambian authorities refused to allow some South African refugees to remain in the country. When Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein, the only one of the accused in the Rivonia Trial to be acquitted, arrived from Bechuanaland with his wife, Hilda, at Lusaka’s airport in October 1964 about a week before independence day, the immigration officer, a colonial official, served them with orders declaring them prohibited immigrants and instructed them to return to Bechuanaland at once. Thomas Nkobi and Tennyson Makiwane managed to contact Kaunda, and they were given permission to stay for a week on condition that they did not talk to the press. Bernstein hoped that he would be able to return to Zambia after independence to work as an architect, but in the end this was not to be. He came to believe that there was then a strong prejudice in Zambia and other independent African countries against white South Africans, whether liberal or communist, and a reluctance to accept that they could be willing to make real sacrifices in the pursuit of national liberation. Although the Zambian government ultimately rejected the Bernsteins, it did give permission to another South African refugee with ANC, or Congress Alliance, connections to settle in the country with his family in January 1965. He was Dr Shaik Ahmod Goolam Randeree, a member of the South African Indian Congress. He set himself up in general practice and his plot at Makeni, ‘Randeree’s’, about seven kilometres from the city centre, was much used by people in transit through the country. He became editor of the ANC publication Mayibuye, which was published in Lusaka from 1967 to 1969, and was one of the delegates from Lusaka to the ANC’s Morogoro conference in 1969. A few months later Jack and Ray Simons arrived in Lusaka, where they were to remain for 25 years and play a central role in the ANC community. Jack Simons was one of South Africa’s most distinguished Marxist intellectuals. After training in law and social anthropology in South Africa and London, he had joined the department of ‘Native Law and Administration’ at the University of Cape Town as a lecturer in 1937. He became a communist in London and, on his return home, played a part with his future wife, Ray Alexander, and Moses Kotane in the revival of the Communist Party of South Africa, which had been decimated by internal disputes and purges. As one of the leaders of the party he voted for its voluntary dissolution in the face of the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 and did not join the underground SACP after its establishment in 1953, though Ray did. He was a brilliant teacher and remained at the University of Cape Town until he was The road to freedom
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banned from teaching in December 1964. Ray Alexander was born in Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1913 and arrived in South Africa in 1929 at the age of 16. She became a member of the central committee of the CPSA at the age of 23 and was involved in the establishment of many non-racial trade unions in the Cape, including the Food and Canning Workers’ Union in 1941, but was banned from trade union work in 1953. A member of the underground SACP, she also continued to be involved illegally in trade union work and was also a founder and promoter of the Federation of South African Women. Jack and Ray Simons had a long-standing interest in political and trade union developments in Central Africa and through this involvement they had acquired allies in Zambia. They left South Africa on one-way exit permits in May 1965 and travelled north by car, carrying with them a letter of introduction to President Kaunda from Chief Albert Luthuli, in which he said that he was sending them to Zambia ‘on loan’. They were allowed into Zambia on a three-week permit and, with the help of Zambian friends, including Justin Chimba, minister of commerce and industry, and Nephas Tembo, later a minister of state, and after some lobbying with Simon Kapwepwe by Barney and Sonia Gordon, they were told in August that they could stay indefinitely. They bought a two-acre plot at 250 Zambezi Road in Roma township, which was about seven kilometres out of town and a kilometre from the new university, where Jack had the prospect of employment as an associate professor of sociology and political science. They then left Zambia for Manchester, where they completed their classic study, Class and colour in South Africa, returning to occupy their new house in December 1967. In the following month Oliver Tambo invited them to join the ANC, more than a year before it was officially opened to nonAfrican members.36 *** In the years from 1960 to 1964 the ANC had mainly been interested in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia as a corridor for the movement to the north of political refugees and military recruits. But from the time of Zambia’s independence onwards, the major preoccupation of the ANC’s leadership was to reverse the flow and to find ways of getting MK people back into South Africa through Bechuanaland. Both Zambia and Bechuanaland/Botswana were reluctant to allow armed men and women to pass through their countries, and the collapse of the underground inside South Africa meant that there was then no machinery in place to receive them. It is to attempts to overcome these difficulties that we now turn.
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Cover photo credits: Front, top: Gisèle Wulfsohn/Visual Archives/UCT Libraries; bottom: UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Centre. Back: Zambia Information Services.
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