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Govan Mbeki . By Colin Bundy . Athens, OH : Ohio University Press , 2013. Pp. 168. $14.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-8214-2046-1 ).
The Idea of the ANC . By Anthony Butler . Athens, OH : Ohio University Press , 2013. Pp. vii + 139. $14.95, paperback (ISBN 9780821420539 ).
Spear of the Nation (Umkhonto Wesizwe): South Africa's Liberation Army, 1960s-1990s . By Janet Cherry . Athens, OH : Ohio University Press , 2012. Pp. 156. $14.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-8214-2026-3 ).
The ANC Youth League . By Clive Glaser . Athens, OH : Ohio University Press , 2013. Pp. 168. $14.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-8214-2044-7 ).
Reviews of Books
Writing in the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian in January 2014, academic Stephen Ellis claimed that at the time of Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1962, he was a member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and that it was the SACP, not the African National Congress (ANC), that was behind the turn to armed struggle. Ellis contended that 'ANC heavies' and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) had supressed this fact until after Mandela's death in an effort to 'burnish the myth of the armed struggle, which was always more theatrical than real'. For Ellis this is part of a broader problem in which the ANC have continually refashioned the past to 'underline [their] own claims to legitimacy' in the postcolonial state. Later that month, Ellis also wrote a piece for the Internet news site www.politicsweb.co.za, in which he questioned the NMCM's timing in releasing a draft of Mandela's autobiography that was smuggled off Robben Island in 1977. Ellis posited that the main differences between the manuscript and the book that eventually became Long Walk to Freedom centred both on 'key historical details' and 'the abundance of information ... on Mandela's personal relationship with the SACP and his embrace of the main tenants of Marxism-Leninism'.
Other commentators have also noted the significance of the prison manuscript, with James Myburgh arguing on politicsweb that large parts of it were 'scrubbed' because of 'Mandela's support for the Soviet Union'. The implications of this apparent recasting of history are at least three-fold. First, Mandela could have simply placed...