The Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements: An Introduction

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Notes

¹ Almost all of the articles in this volume were first presented at the Journal of Southern African Studies’ conference, titled Southern Africa Beyond the West, held in Livingstone, Zambia, in August 2015. The discussions that took place in that venue were vital to developing the ideas represented here.

² Writing about liberation movements inevitably involves a forest of acronyms. We consolidate those cited herein in this note to avoid constant disruption of the text. The armed wing of the South African ANC is uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Zimbabwe’s liberation movements are the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and its armed wing, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZPRA or ZIPRA), and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and its armed wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). After independence in 1980, ZANU became ZANU(PF), the PF referring to the Patriotic Front. In Mozambique, Frelimo is the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique. In Namibia, SWAPO is the South West African People’s Organisation. The Apartheid state’s forces that fought against SWAPO are the South West African Territorial Force (SWATF) and Koevoet (crowbar), a police counter-insurgency unit. In Angola, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) rivalled the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA).

³ H. Sapire and C. Saunders (eds), Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa in Context: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Claremont, UCT Press, 2013), p. 7. See also H. Sapire, ‘Liberation Movements, Exile and International Solidarity: An Introduction’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35, 2 (2009), pp. 271–86.

⁴ L. White and M. Larmer, ‘Introduction: Mobile Soldiers and Un-National Liberation of Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 6 (2014), pp. 1271–74.

⁵ Ibid., p. 1271.

⁶ A major contribution on camps is C. Williams, National Liberation in Post-Colonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015). For different approaches, related to the ANC, see S. Ellis, ‘Mbokodo: Security in ANC Camps, 1961-1990’, African Affairs, 93, 371 (1994), pp. 279–98, and S. Davis, ‘Training and Deployment at Novo Catengue and the Diaries of Jack Simons, 1977–1979’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 6 (2014), pp. 1325–42. The work on the ANC in exile has broken new ground in many other areas too. In a large literature, see the important work of M. Suriano and A. Lissoni, ‘Married to the ANC: Tanzanian Women’s Entanglement in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 1 (2014), pp. 129–50; C. Tsampiras, ‘Sex in a Time of Exile: An Examination of Sexual Health, AIDS, Gender and the ANC, 1980–1990’, South African Historical Journal, 64, 3 (2012), pp. 637–63; R. Sandwell, ‘“Love I Cannot Begin to Explain”: The Politics of Reproduction in the ANC in Exile, 1976–1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41, 1 (2015), pp. 63–81; S. Hassim, ‘Nationalism, Feminism and Autonomy: The ANC in Exile and the Question of Women’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30, 3 (2004), pp. 433–55; M. Armstrong, ‘Healthcare in Exile: ANC Health Policy and Health Care provision in MK Camps, 1964 to 1989’, South African Historical Journal, 6, 2 (2014), pp. 270–90; S. Morrow, B. Maaba, and L. Pulumani, Education in Exile: SOMAFCO, the ANC School in Tanzania, 1978–1992 (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2004). Much of this work relates to Tanzania. A related body of literature focuses on Dar es Salaam’s role as a cosmopolitan hub for political movements and as a ‘Cold War city’. See G. Roberts, ‘Politics, Decolonisation and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam, c. 1965–72’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2016).

⁷ The work of O.A. Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), is seminal in this regard. The questions raised by Westad have sparked growing debates among scholars of particular regions, not least over the balance of influence among actors and ideas from the ‘East’, ‘West’ and ‘South’. See, for example, the special issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, 43, 2 (2011), devoted to ‘Relocating Arab Nationalism’.

⁸ Sapire, ‘Liberation Movements’, p. 276.

⁹ For a groundbreaking collection of work, see Q. Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York, Berghahn, 2015).

¹⁰ See V. Shubin, The Hot ‘Cold War’: The USSR in Southern Africa (London, Pluto Press, 2008), among his other works.

¹¹ See, for example, the formidable studies by Hugh Macmillan, The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1963–1994 (Auckland Park, Jacana Media, 2013), and T. Simpson, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle (Cape Town, Penguin Books, 2016).

¹² The value of access to ‘movement archives’ is demonstrated by the work of Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi, one of the few scholars able to use ZANU’s archive extensively. See her For Better or Worse? Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle (Harare, Weaver Press, 2000).

¹³ G. Mazarire, ‘Rescuing Zimbabwe’s “Other” Liberation Archives’, in C. Saunders (ed.), Documenting Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2010), pp. 95–106. Personal collections – so-called tin trunk archives – have been lauded among historians of Africa for the windows they open on neglected topics. See K. Barber (ed.), Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006).

¹⁴ On these genres of writing, see, for example, S. Nuttall,‘Telling “Free” Stories? Memory and Democracy in South African Autobiography since 1994’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998).

¹⁵ Offering up an African ‘voice’ in any straightforward way is not, however, the goal of more recent uses of oral histories. See L. White, S.F. Miescher, and D.W. Cohen (eds), African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2001).

¹⁶ It is instructive to place the work of scholars who have delved deep into the GDR archives alongside Marcia Schenk’s oral histories of African actors in the GDR. The stories they tell share common ground, but they are also profoundly different in what they reveal about the ways in which the history of solidarity, ideology, discipline, and social life was recorded, interpreted and remembered. Compare, for example, S. Pugach, ‘African Students and the Politics of Race and Gender in the German Democratic Republic’, in Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color, pp. 131–56, and M. Schenck, ‘Eastalgia in Mozambique: Memories and Dreams of Mozambican Contract Laborers to the German Democratic Republic’, paper presented to the African Studies Seminar, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 19 May 2016. Schenck notes that her findings contrast sharply with a post-unification German literature that draws on archival sources.

¹⁷ M.A. Pitcher, ‘Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique’, Africa, 76, 1 (2006), pp. 88–112.

¹⁸ See Williams, National Liberation; J. Pearce, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola 1975–2002 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015).

¹⁹ Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 4. See also J. Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 20.

²⁰ Q. Slobodian, ‘Introduction’, in Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color, p. 7, and see contributions to this collection more widely.

²¹ David Engerman, for example, argues that the Eastern-bloc archives allow the study of ‘the USSR in transnational context’ – that is, they allow for more sophisticated understandings of Soviet (and other) engagements with the Second World, rather than shifting the lens to, as in this volume, African theatres of intervention as seen through southern African actors’ eyes. D. Engerman ‘The Second World’s Third World’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 12, 1 (2011), pp. 183–211. Similar points are made regarding the Middle East. See, for example, N.J. Citino, ‘Between Regional and Global Narratives’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 43, 2 (2011), p. 314.

²² Important work in this regard can be found in P. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002); T. Smith, ‘New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, 24, 4 (2000); and Friedman, Shadow Cold War.