3. The Exile Decades: 1960–1990
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.
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].
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].
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