Herman Preuss about Stephen Ellis' book 'External Mission: The ANC in exile, 1960-1990' in Business Day

WITH External Mission: The ANC in Exile, Stephen Ellis, the Desmond Tutu professor in social sciences at the Free University Amsterdam, aims to bust various myths that have developed about the African National Congress (ANC) during its exile years from 1960 to 1990.

When the ANC was a banned organisation, news reports in South Africa about it were sparse and this allowed both the apartheid counterinsurgency agents and the ANC’s communist supporters to generate their own myths about what the ANC was and was not. The central theme of the book is how important the South African Communist Party (SACP) was in the leadership of the ANC and how important its links with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were. The cover has a backdrop of Moscow with Mao Zedong and SACP members Jusuf Dadoo and Vella Pillay to the fore, on November 3 1960, well before the official launch of the ANC’s armed wing on December 16 1961.

In order to bust the myths, Ellis is meticulous about citing sources; for the 39 pages of the first chapter, A Call to Arms, he provides 175 references. One of them is the minutes of an SACP meeting held on May 13 1982, at which a veteran former member of the party’s central committee, John Pule Motshabi, explained the background to Nelson Mandela’s recruitment into the SACP.

Read the whole article here.