[Nelson Mandela is deified everywhere. But typically missing is an
account of his early years, when he insisted that Marxism be
responsive to South African conditions.]
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MANDELA’S BLACK MARXISM  
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An interview with Paul S. Landau by Chris Webb
June 16, 2023
Africa is a Country
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_ Nelson Mandela is deified everywhere. But typically missing is an
account of his early years, when he insisted that Marxism be
responsive to South African conditions. _

, Image credit Francisco Anzola via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

 

In the extensive mythologizing of Nelson Mandela’s life, we
frequently encounter a flattened political figure without nuance or
contradiction. In a memorial following his death, then US President
Barack Obama described him as an heir to Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln, a
figure who defeated apartheid through moral courage alone. Then there
is the Mandela of T-shirts and television specials, the smiling
grandfather, the Mandela of reconciliation and compromise.

These interpretations serve a variety of political purposes, but they
all neglect the fact that Mandela’s intellectual and political
development underwent a series of transformations over the course of
his life. In Paul S. Landau’s latest book, _Spear: Mandela and the
Revolutionaries_, we encounter an altogether different Mandela, one
who is very much made by the company he keeps, the places he travels,
and the books he reads. This is the Mandela of the anti-colonial era,
preoccupied with military strategy, who makes marginal notes on Mao,
and who debates the success of the Cuban revolution with his comrades.

_Spear_ covers the period, roughly, from the Sharpeville massacre of
1960 to the Rivonia trial of 1963-1964. It marks a critical period in
the history of the anti-apartheid movement, as state repression
intensifies and as the space for aboveground political opposition
diminishes. It tells the story of how Mandela, alongside other
activists in the ANC and Communist Party, sought to channel popular
anger into organized violence against the apartheid state, and in
doing so perhaps create the possibilities for revolution. This is a
period of significant personal and political turbulence in Mandela’s
life. He moves from the anti-communism of his ANC-Youth League days to
becoming a high-ranking member of the Communist Party. He challenges
the non-violent principles of then ANC-president Albert Lutuli,
undergoes military training in Ethiopia, and seeks aid from the Soviet
Union and China. What emerges is the complexity of Mandela’s
thought, his insistence that Marxism be responsive to South African
conditions, and his shrewd organizational skills.

Landau engages in a careful reconstruction, piecing together
Mandela’s readings, debates, movements, and friendships during this
period. It is rich in detail, at times almost dizzying, yet provides a
sense of what was at stake in a period when revolution seemed
possible.

CW

I wanted to start by asking you about the photo on the cover of your
book. Taken in Ethiopia in 1962, we see a young, bearded Mandela
flanked by two individuals, one of them wearing a military officer’s
uniform. Can you provide some of the context for this photo. Who are
the two men in this photo and what was Mandela doing in Ethiopia?

PSL

The USA and world edition cover shows Mandela beside Tadesse Biru and
Fekadu Wondemu, two members of the Ethiopian emperor’s special guard
unit called the Fetno Derash. Tadesse was the superior officer and
they had both received special military training in Israel. His son,
Musie Tadesse, works in Washington DC as the managing doorman and
receptionist in a big Washington DC apartment building lobby. He
showed me the original photograph. These men are with Mandela because
they trained him for over three weeks in military basics, including
weaponry, in 1962, and they became friends. They represent one pole of
revolutionary logic to Mandela, if you will. They were part of a
surviving 18th-19th century African empire resonant of African
heritage and power, with roots in ancient Aksum.

The South African cover is different, and shows Mandela in an undated,
unprovenanced photograph. It is from Morocco from January or February
or March 1962. I made inquiries in Algeria, but it can only roughly be
dated. Mandela is looking up from some papers with two unnamed
Algerians, likely _Front de Libération Nationale_ (FLN) or _Armée
de libération nationale_ (the FLN’s military wing) officials.
Right behind Mandela’s left shoulder is Jacques Vergés, the famous
French-Thai lawyer who later defended Carlos “the Jackal.”

CW

Your book does an incredible job of situating the emergence of MK
within the broader currents of anti-colonial struggle that
characterized the early 1960s. Could you describe where Mandela and
his comrades looked to for inspiration in these early days?

PSL

In the 1940s and 50s, Mandela’s seniors in the ANC had organized
connections to Caribbean and American Black leaders—these were cut
off by government in the 1960s. In the turn to organized violent
resistance, Mandela was following the lead of Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro,
and to some extent, the Irgun, the Jewish extremist resistance against
the British in Palestine. The immediate example of Malaysia, the
Philippines, Cuba, and especially China occupied Mandela’s attention
as a reader of revolutionary writings. China’s influence came
through early leaders’ training in China, and Mandela’s (and Moses
Kotane’s and OR Tambo’s) interest in rural rebellion. At the same
time, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) anti-apartheid fighters paid
attention to Congo and the rise of Patrice Lumumba and looked to
Ghana’s pan-African leadership. The point is to recognize that
Mandela operated at the confluence of local understandings and
internationally espoused revolutionary practices.

CW

Many of the historical accounts of MK suggest it was either the
creation of the South African Communist Party or a result of the
ANC’s retreat underground and rejection of non-violence. Can you
tell us how your book complicates these conventional readings? Where
did the decision to engage in violent resistance come from?

PSL

The shift in the movement toward violence came on two fronts. First,
many young people wished to fight the apartheid government, full stop.
This fed instances of public violence, and Mandela recognized the
dangers of unorganized violence. Whenever he, or Walter Sisulu, toured
the country in secret, they canvased youth. A similar push was
responsible for the early formation of Poqo units in and around the
PAC, and that also accelerated Mandela’s thinking. The second front
came out of initial discussions among men in jail in Johannesburg and
elsewhere during the early “state of emergency” declared by
[Hendrik] Verwoerd after the 1960 Sharpeville killings. They decided
they no longer wanted to limit the ANC and SACP to nonviolence. Their
discussions did not contain details, but they informed Mandela’s
organization of MK, and his role in the ANC “Action Group.”

But an important thing _Spear_ explores is how the PAC’s Poqo and
MK (then from 1962 ANC-MK) influenced and modeled one another.
Historians have treated their trajectories as separate and distinct
even though some of their protagonists knew one another and even
worked with each other and had similar original affiliations. So, I
would say, the abstraction of a very particular ANC and MK history,
that is what I’d like to open up to doubt.

CW

I was struck by how this turn to violence had such a transformative
impact on those involved—even as it didn’t have much of a material
impact on the apartheid economy. How were acts of sabotage understood
in the broader context of the struggle? Were they seen as weakening
apartheid’s infrastructure, or were they symbolic acts that would
spark greater resistance?

PSL

That is a question I struggled with. The meaning of downing a pylon
was smeared across the representational and the transformative (as an
action), in unpredictable ways. One could point to the effect, if
effective, or the noise and momentary inconvenience as a sign, if
ineffective. This bifurcation of standards, where two emphases could
tag-team, ensured that for every delay or underwhelming action, the
suffering through striving in any form was still valorized. It won’t
do to understand MK as entirely a strategic operation with a fixed
political target. Mandela understood that the state would respond in
such a fashion that only escalation into new forms of chaos were
possible. He well understood the future trajectory in which armed
actions initiated further disruption, and in which ordinary civilian
life was to be impaired.

But what was being explored at the time was something that could not
(as it turned out) be in South Africa, an urban and rural simultaneity
using weapons and explosives and snipers, leading to the establishment
of several simultaneous liberated centers, including in Johannesburg,
in which, under a Unity Front, MK would offer safe harbor to fighters.
This however came apart under pressure just as aspects were begun, and
it fractured along different lines in different parts of South Africa.

CW

I want to ask about how this period of intense political activity
shaped and reshaped Mandela’s political thinking. He was schooled in
the radical program of the ANC-Youth League in the previous decade,
but his thinking around Pan Africanism, communism, and non-racialism
goes through some mutations during the period you cover in the book.
Could you describe these changes and their influence?

PSL

Mandela was a rather high-born fellow, educated and worldly, who
emerged as a leader from within the core Youth League in Johannesburg.
The principle of African leadership of African organizations is
something Mandela cherished. From his first experiences as a lawyer,
Mandela had white friends, and sought out urban, non-provincial
interactions with people of all races. Everyone around him was joining
the illegal South African Communist Party (SACP), and when he did so,
almost certainly in 1955, he carried with him the reputation of being
the leading activist leader of the ANC. At the same time, Mandela and
his close comrades sought out world pan-Africanists and worked very
hard to achieve a united front with the PAC—something that failed to
materialize.

In 1962, after seven years, Mandela countenanced a total end of SACP
activity per se, for MK and the ANC, such that after that—not
entirely successfully, especially as the Party was unimpeded in
London—Moses Kotane pursued a zero-party policy for all MK camps. My
suggestion, in _Spear_, is that this demotion of the Party was the
prelude to a renewed effort to ignite a South African Unity Front
(SAUF) with other organizations, including the remains of the PAC in
South Africa and abroad. The popularity and persistence of the
PAC-Poqo, as an interlocutor with the ANC-MK and a target for making a
functioning unity coalition in ’62, is an argument of the book.

CW

I think many people associate United Fronts with the United Democratic
Front of the 1980s. Could you talk a bit about this idea for a South
African United Front (SAUF) of the 1960s, where it came from and why
it failed at this juncture?

PSL

From a foreign point of view, there should only be one African
liberationist organization, and subsidiaries, in one country. Kwame
Nkrumah ran a special fund for liberation movements and kept funds for
the initial iteration of SAUF abroad, involving the ANC, PAC, a
Namibian organization, and repeatedly brought ANC and PAC
representatives together. A real unity would entail internal
cooperation, too. The second center was in Dar es Salaam, where Julius
Nyerere had a looser vision of confederate or community order. Mandela
attended a Pan African Freedom Movement of Eastern and Central Africa
(a precursor to the AU) in Addis Ababa with OR Tambo. It was at this
point, when Mandela returned from abroad in 1962, that we see his
revolutionary nationalism, influenced by Castro for one, but also by
world African and Black anti-colonialism.

Why did a possibly transformative unity fail? We do not have a lot of
real evidence to put in between two covers. I would suggest that the
CIA’s archives and the SIS (British MI6 intelligence) cables be
fully investigated, first, because the full story of who was
compromised and when in the PAC ranks (and the ANC’s) has not (in my
opinion) been fully illuminated. But surely Mandela’s capture was a
real blow. And the use of torture and isolation cells broke a lot of
MK just as unity would have needed a boost.

CW

Mandela was a member of the Communist Party, but he was hardly an
orthodox Marxist; He wasn’t following a party line from Moscow. What
sort of a communist was Mandela and how was his Marxism refracted
through South African conditions?

PSL

For Mandela, the ongoing tension in communist thinking was this:
between wanting to follow the “people,” and wanting, or needing,
to lead the “people” when violence loomed. Mandela was interested
operationally in durable chains of command resilient to disruption. He
and a small committee would be in charge, because no above-board
democratic process was possible, in their organization, given state
repression. But I think Mandela was also a communist in that he
espoused recognition of contradictions that could not be resolved,
except by challenging production and distribution in their existing
forms. So, the interest in the vast spaces of the African and
farm-labor tenantry countryside as areas of organization was real.
Second, there is a connection to surviving traditional (but
transformed) chiefly structures, some of which Mandela well knew were
on the ANC’s side. But none of that was done, and the urban side of
spatial liberation was premised entirely on secrecy.

CW

I wanted to ask about the influence of what you call “Black
Marxism” on the SACP. How did figures like JB Marks, Moses Kotane,
Dan Tloome, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu shape the political and
theoretical orientation of the party during this period?

PSL

One vein of Black Marxism is in the self-narration of the movement;
the ideology of anti-apartheid being explicitly tied to a project of
revealing British complicity and other capitalist mechanisms in the
long dispossession of Africans from the land. But there was also the
intersection between global Black thinkers and activists, instantiated
by great Caribbean leaders and thinkers and communist parties, which
is Black Marxism, and Mandela found himself within these currents.

As to the second part of the question, in _Spear_,I spend time
sketching out biographies just briefly enough to allow the reader to
know many of these men and women, Sisulu, Marks, Moses Kotane, Dan
Tloome, and lesser-known people who were in fact quite important.
These and dozens of other men and women populate _Spear _because
they were the colleagues in leadership and some in middling positions
around Mandela without which nothing would have happened. There is in
the book trade more generally a lack of toleration with naming a lot
of Black people interacting with each other. So, in a sense, it’s
partly to restore Mandela’s affiliation to a Black liberationist
project with others, that I use the term “Black Marxist.”

That being said, he walked a narrow path, and had to dodge around a
lot to keep the focus on building a vanguard military force, his plan;
building a broad coalition among ANC and PAC, seeking anonymity
sometimes and not others, cooperating, if with doubts, toward
presenting a united front (SAUF or otherwise) outside and potentially
within South Africa.

Mandela wanted to operate in a durable chain of command at first
without tapping the reorganized residentially based ANC. His last move
came in July 1962, when he demoted the Communist Party after
conversations with his peers (I found this document) and went to speak
to Chief Albert Lutuli, president of the ANC, about this. The whole
underground ANC was to be made part of immediate revolutionary
activity, Black and class liberation.

No coincidence perhaps that around this time, the local CIA man
fingered Mandela to the Special Branch cops.

CW

On that last point, I was surprised to read about the role that MI6
played in Botswana, essentially helping to organize passage for many
revolutionaries to leave the country and be trained abroad in China or
the Soviet Bloc. At the same time, Don Rickard, the CIA’s man in
Durban, admitted to tipping off the police leading to Mandela’s
arrest. How can we understand the complex, and at times seemingly
contradictory, roles of intelligence services during this time?

PSL

Perfidious Albion, on one level. But on another, in the retiring
colonial service at this intersection were a lot of strangely somewhat
sympathetic and interesting persons. It is unpopular to say this, no
doubt. But if you were devoted to the tenor of the times and were part
of the imperial edifice, and looked at the statements of the Labor
Party and saw the Union Jacks coming down, and understood your
function as working toward that end, well… But in the end, times
were changing, and new connections were being made. One finds the
Fetno Derash and the Irgun model side by side with a long-term Maoist
focus in MK, securing some Soviet money, but with British SIS-funded
border intelligence abetting them. Everything was in motion.

It was different for the CIA. They may have had a narrower view. As
you say, CIA man Don Rickard said he did it, and then told John
Irvin’s film crew and James Sanders, “I did it,” again. I’m
also aware of someone who told Rickard that Mandela was at the soiree
he attended before being arrested, but I’ve buried that name because
no intel is foolproof and there is no point making a person or family
a target.

CW

I want to ask about method. You write that many books both on Mandela
and this period “adopt a perspective of world Whiteness,” in which
Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and others are figureheads but aren’t taken
seriously as political thinkers and strategists. What method does the
book employ to try and address this?

PSL

It’s based overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) on the remembrances,
in interviews transcribed, edited into books, or (sometimes) in raw
audio, with Black men and women involved in MK from 1960–1963. I had
to fight against the grain of archival and source availability,
because it is mostly white leaders and comrades who have left telling,
personal, confessional memoirs, or attracted admiring and yet
penetrating biographers. But there are audio and transcribed records,
left by my colleagues, whom I thank (and got permissions from), and
they are in no way responsible for what I make of their interviews or
mistakes I make. But that is what allowed me to get to know many of
the protagonists around Mandela.

But there is a certain discourse: The real communists are imagined to
be the white ones, which is and was wrongheaded. Now, true, there was
no more stable a party member than “Rusty” Bernstein, for
instance, a relatively unknown Jewish British-born South African, and
no more critical a lynchpin in MK, than Jack Hodgson, a former
fortune-hunting machinery operator in central African mining. But
Edwin Mofutsanyana, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Kotane, and others broke that
barrier. From 1955, Duma Nokwe, Joe Matthews, Walter Sisulu, and
Nelson Mandela among other African ANC members were also all inside
the SACP. The transition in the Party was that the old guard was moved
to accept revolutionary strategic action, first in Mandela’s
participation in Alfred Xuma’s removal as ANC president, and then
later, in the decision to change tactics and use violence.

_About the Interviewee_

_PAUL S. LANDAU is a professor of history at the University of
Maryland, College Park, and a fellow of the History Centre of the
University of Johannesburg._

_About the Interviewer_

_CHRIS WEBB is a South African writer and researcher based in Toronto.
He is writing a book on the meaning and practice of solidarity in the
Canadian anti-apartheid movement._

_AFRICA IS A COUNTRY [[link removed]] is a site of
opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African left. It
was founded by Sean Jacobs [[link removed]] in 2009.
Unless otherwise noted, all the content on Africa Is a Country is
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* Nelson Mandela
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* South Africa
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* Marxism
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* History
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* South African Communist Party
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* ANC
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* armed struggle
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