With MK in Exile, in Fine Detail

A new book, If We Must Die: An Autobiography of a Former Commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe, by Stanley Manong, published last month by a small private firm, Nkululeko, is the most important first-hand history in 25 years of the painful struggles for liberation and for democracy, accountability and human rights in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in Angola, between 1977 and 1986.

Attended by about 50 former MK veterans, the book was launched by its author last Saturday (18 April) at Liliesleaf Museum, the former secret headquarters in Johannesburg of the founders of MK: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki.

The book is an indispensable source.

In addition to massive detail about individual MK members, military engagements and repressions, Stanley Manong – a civil engineer and head of his own company, and former Chief of Operations of MK in Botswana in the mid-1980s - provides comprehensive, balanced and reliable evidence in support of previous published accounts as well as witnesses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the deeply grounded culture of unaccountability in the ANC in exile.

In his Introduction – with a mass of proof especially in the second half of the book – Manong states explicitly that he has attempted to “draw lessons from the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin”, citing Nikita Khrushchev’s statement that Stalin acted “not through persuasion…but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion”, leading to the “moral and physical annihilation” of any critic. (p.xxv)

With reference to the coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet against the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, he forthrightly describes the ANC’s notorious security department, known as Imbokodo (“the grindstone”), as a “junta”, together with its  leaders in its heyday – Joe Modise, Mzwandile (“Mzwai”) Piliso and former Fort Hare lecturer and subsequent SANDF brigadier general, Andrew Masondo. (p.251)

Comparing Piliso with Stalin’s most feared security chief, Lavrentiy Beriya, he states that “Comrade Mzwai was responsible for a department that saw the worst gross human rights violations that ever occurred in the history of the ANC in exile.” (p.244)

He reports how in Quibaxe camp “we discussed how the authorities managed to muzzle critical political debate in Angola. Everyone except the camp administration agreed that since the late 1970s cadres were not allowed to freely express themselves politically due to fear of victimisation. …

“Indeed it took genuine revolutionaries to have had the guts of challenging the excesses committed by the ANC in Angola during its years in exile.” (p.243)

As the most senior MK commander with experience in Angola to have published such a revealing autobiography, Manong takes a further extraordinary step by relating the methodology of Imbokodo to that of Hitler.

Introducing one chapter with a quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he continues “it is clear that the authorities in Angola mastered his teachings regarding his sayings about a leader of genius having the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.

“According to Hitler, in doing so, the State would be able to isolate its opponents, make it difficult for them to work and act in unison thereby weakening any resistance directed at the State. …

“Such was the ruthlessness of Imbokodo in Angola…”. (pp.241-42)

The relevance of this long-prepared, thoughtful, anguished and deeply moral autobiography is that its observations on South African history of 30 years ago by an ANC loyalist and proud veteran of the liberation struggle come with a blunt connection to the worst episode of the present government.

This connection is not made lightly. Manong explains in the first chapter how – while he was active in MK in exile - his mother died of burns on 7 December 1985 in an “untimely and brutal” murder, following the last of three successive arson attack on the family home in Victoria West carried out by well-known local apartheid regime loyalists. There were no convictions in the courts.

In measured terms, he describes his feelings of guilt for having entrusted the posting of letters to his mother to a subsequently revealed high level traitor to MK, Joe Mamasela. In the same way, he describes his own incarceration and abusive treatment by Imbokodo at a previously unreported detention centre in Angola, nicknamed as “Iran” by its inmates in sardonic comparison with the slaughter of its critics by the Shia jihadi regime of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Concerning the massacre of 34 unarmed miners and the wounding of 78 others by highly armed police at Marikana in August 2012, he writes: “Never in one’s imagination during the years of struggle, did we ever fathom to think that a future democratic government led by the ANC could mow down in such ruthlessness and brutality, unarmed workers who were yearning for some of the values enshrined in the Freedom Charter to be implemented…”. (p.xxv)

As an independent professional engineer trained to world standards, and the head of his own company, he criticises the “moral degeneration among some of the present cadres of the ANC who want to amass unspeakable wealth overnight”, describing them as a “nascent entrepreneurial and parasitic bourgeoisie.” (p.xxvi)

Launched at Liliesleaf Museum in the immediate wake of the outbreak of xenophobic attacks in Durban and Johannesburg – with the government described by Allister Sparks in February as a “coalition of the useless, a gaggle of ANC toadies, South African Communist Party carpetbaggers and a broken Congress of South African Trade Unions, all pulling in different directions and going nowhere” – this book which will be read with care by families and friends of the scores of MK members in exile whose lives it reports, as well as by historians, journalists and general readers. It has been privately published so as to keep its cost of purchase to a minimum.

If there is one figure in MK to whom Stanley Manong gives the highest respect for his teaching and example as educator of the recruits of the 1976 school students’ generation, and in opposition to the moral degeneration of the ANC, it is Mark Shope, who died in 1998 – former miner, general secretary of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and political instructor in MK.

As the shootings were taking place at Marikana, he writes, “I could not stop thinking about the sentiments expressed by Mark Shope in his lessons regarding the importance of imparting political knowledge and understanding to our security forces.” (p.69) He stresses Shope’s insistence that he was teaching politics to the recruits so that “you can use it against me” if one day he himself deviated from the principles of the ANC. (p.80)

Just as he pays tribute to Mark Shope, and to the bravery of MK partisans such as his friend and comrade Barney Molokoane, Manong pays tribute to Oliver Tambo’s practice as acting President of the ANC of not taking a decision without first going through a thorough consultation with colleagues.

He makes a careful and detailed analysis of the so-called “mutiny” of MK troops at Viana camp outside Luanda in February 1984, of the subsequent armed conflict between MK troops and loyalist forces at Pango camp the following May, which culminated in executions, and provides the first ever detailed autobiographical account of the Kabwe conference of the ANC in June 1985, as well as of the “fraud in electing delegates” to this conference which “extended to the whole of Angola.” (p.226)

Here, too, Manong’s information about ANC practice in Angola in the mid-1980s illuminates current breaches of the rule of law and democratic practice in South Africa. Exactly the same “fraud in electing delegates” within the ANC in Free State was established by the Constitutional Court in December 2012, immediately ahead of the Mangaung national elective conference, following an application by MK veteran Mpho Ramakatsa and five other ANC members in Free State who successfully proved that there had been a whole series of irregularities in fraudulent support of the present ANC provincial leadership.

 A weakness of the book, however, is its failure to give attention to the unchallenged evidence provided in English last year by the British journalist Lara Pawson in her book, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (IB Tauris, London). Pawson reports that tens of thousands of its own supporters were executed by the MPLA government of Angola in May 1977 and the following months, when Stanley Manong and his fellow recruits were already in training in southern Angola. It does no good to reproduce the fiction spread by the perpetrators of one of the worst massacres in southern African history, when the truth has been available in English for a year, and in autobiographies and historical studies written in Portuguese since 2007.

Manong is fully justified in stressing a major democratic achievement: “the absence of intra-party mass executions within the ANC that characterised most National Liberation Movements in Africa in the 1960s and 1970’s.” (p.86)

Damage is done however to a proper understanding of Angola both during the time of the ANC’s presence there, and afterwards – just as in relation to Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe – by not facing up to an awful truth.

The matter is all the more chilling since Manong relates how narrowly the ANC escaped a massacre of its own troops by armoured units of the Angolan Presidential Guard at Viana camp in February 1984, when the MK District Commander in Luanda, Omry Makgoale (MK name Sidwell Moroka, or Mhlongo) – who “wielded enormous influence” and “earned a lot of respect amongst the rank and file” – persuaded them to surrender their weapons, rather than be shot to pieces. (p.208) For this, as Manong indicates, Makgoale was subjected to more than four years of brutality in Quatro prison camp.

With his carefully researched and detailed study of MK in exile, Stanley Manong complements and augments the memoir by five former MK veterans, “A Miscarriage of Democracy: The ANC Security Department in the 1984 Mutiny in Umkhonto we Sizwe”, by Bandile Ketelo and four colleagues, which I secured for publication in a banned exile magazine produced in London, Searchlight South Africa, in July 1990.

No other publication since then adds such an understanding of the inner life of the ANC in Angola, MK’s most important base before the end of the Cold War and the return of its members from exile.

It makes essential reading for MK veterans, ANC members, historians and the general public. The author has done a great service.