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Davis Stephen R.. The ANC’s War against Apartheid: Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. xliv + 268 pp. Photographs. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $35.00. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-253-03229-4.
The ANC’s War against Apartheid: Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa is an innovative book that seeks to call into question dominant interpretations of the armed struggle waged by Umkontho we Sizwe (MK) against the apartheid state between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s. Stephen R. Davis, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, aims to do this through a disavowal of narrative-driven history in favor of an exploration of selected “episodes.” He presents his text as “an assemblage of archival and historiographical knots that provide new ways of looking at the armed struggle and liberation struggle at large.” The intention is not that the author will “untie them,” but rather that he will “explore old evidence in new ways, introduce new evidence to old narratives” and “apply a different set of critical lenses to all this material” (xxxii). Undoubtedly, given the ambitious scope of this project, some aspects are bound to work and others not.
What works?...