Stephen R. Davis. The ANC’s War against Apartheid

In this illuminating book, The ANC’s War against Apartheid: Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa, Stephen R. Davis provides a forensic overview of the historiography of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the guerrilla army created jointly by the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Formed in 1961, MK fought sporadically and with uneven success for three decades before it was finally integrated into the post-apartheid defense forces in the mid-1990s. In an introductory chapter, Davis presents a brief history of MK and the armed struggle. Rather than comprising a narrative in itself, this chapter shows how writers with different preoccupations—anti-communist crusaders, academic sympathizers, party loyalists supporting an official history of events, SACP veterans celebrating the party’s role, and ordinary participants expressing dissident views—have created quite different interpretations of events and of the wider significance of the military struggle as a whole. The author is not interested in creating a new narrative history of the armed struggle. Instead he is determined to understand how and why so many divergent histories of MK have been constructed, how they have framed the organization’s military campaigns, how they determine which events to include and exclude, and how they have been used to sustain and render legitimate contemporary political projects. Davis accomplishes these tasks by exploring in depth five “episodes” that have been deployed in very different ways in professional historians’ and ex-combatants’ grand narratives about thirty years of armed struggle.

Art · Citizen journalism · Communism · Historiography · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies