There was always a danger that the methods of rule of Quatro and Mbokodo, as well as corruption at the head of the ANC in exile, would return to the infinitely richer pickings of South Africa itself, once the African National Congress installed itself in government, ("until Jesus comes back," as a prominent worshipper once put it).

And so it has come to pass.

As early as 1969, in his famous Memorandum (which nearly cost him and six colleagues their lives), Chris Hani pointed out to the party's National Executive Committee that certain comrades appeared more interested in lining their pockets with the proceeds of their own private enterprise than pursuing the struggle against the apartheid state. It did not make him popular with Joe Modise, the commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in exile, who in retrospect appears almost a saintly figure by comparison with the author of the sermon from Nkandla.

As pointed out in the Memorandum, its authors "made a political analysis and attributed all the weaknesses we complained of to political and personal failings of some of our leaders."

In a second memorandum, they pointed out: "Orders were given for our arrest for alleged treachery. Dungeons were dug at Livingstone [in south-western Zambia] for our reception. We would probably have been thrown into these dungeons but for the intervention of a leading comrade. The Acting President [Oliver Tambo] ordered the dungeons to be closed, and convened a meeting of militants to consider our case."

(It seems that the word "dungeons" might have been more appropriately written as "graves", given that several had already been "dug").

Under the circumstances, it should not be surprising that the issue of corruption came up again in the ANC in exile with the next generation to take up arms against the apartheid state, the generation of 1976 - the heirs and pupils of Steve Biko.

The story is told in a classic historical account, "A miscarriage of democracy", by five veterans of uMkhonto we Sizwe from that generation - members of the June 16 and Moncada detachments - which was written and first published 23 years ago. Its words retain a living intensity today, noting in two successive paragraphs the conjoined issues of repression of political criticism and of corruption. The MK soldiers described their history in Angola and in Zambia as follows:

"In a bid to strengthen their repressive apparatus, Andrew Masondo created a security crack force in a camp known as Viana, near Luanda [in Angola]. This unit, known as ODP (Peoples' Defence Organization), was composed mainly of very young men or boys. Its tasks were to guard the ANC leadership when they paid visits to different camps, to enforce discipline and bash up any forms of dissent and ‘disloyalty'. By this time, after the Fazenda events, the ANC leaders had begun to whip up an 'internal-enemy-danger-psychosis,' and whenever they visited the camps they had to be heavily guarded. Worse still if it was Tambo who visited: the whole camp would be disarmed, and only the security personnel and those attached to it would be allowed to carry weapons.

"The next hot spot for the ANC was in Zambia, where the headquarters of the ANC was based and where most of the leadership was living. This was in 1980. MK cadres, who had been drilled for months in ‘communist ideology' of the Soviet-East European type to denounce all luxuries and accept the hazards of the struggle, here came into direct confrontation with the opposite way of life lived by the ANC leaders. It became clear that the financial support extended to the ANC was used to finance the lavish way of life of the ANC leadership. Corruption, involving rackets of car, diamond and drug smuggling, was on a high rise. The security department itself was rocked by internal dissent between those who supported a heavy-handed approach and the predominantly young cadres who opposed it." (Full text in Inside Quatro, Jacana, 2009. p.13).

In this light, to imagine that a regime of blatant corruption and repression at the head of the ANC will be accepted with the patience of the ox or the sweetness of the lamb "until Jesus comes back" by its members (or black South Africans generally) is not to know history.

I do not need to point out the consequences in the ANC in exile for its failure to allow democratic expression of critical thought by its most highly principled and most active members.

Repression took place then at successive stages, successfully for its executors in the ANC leadership, in so far as its critics were crushed by force.

But the ANC in exile in the frontline states of Angola, Zambia and Tanzania was essentially a military body at war with a very powerful, well armed and ruthless foe, the apartheid state. In many ways the ANC in exile under military discipline was as much a totalitarian society as the German Democratic Republic or the Soviet Union, where its security apparatus Mbokodo and its troops were trained, and from where the social psychology of its political prison camp, Quatro, in northern Angola, was learnt from the Gulag.

There was no free press, there was no independent judiciary, there were extreme limits on free discussion, there was no internet (such as Politicsweb, or the Daily Maverick, or the website of the Mail & Guardian), there was no National Assembly inhabited by alternative opposition political parties, there was no Constitution, and above all - there was no mass citizenry, which showed again and again, whether in its Defiance campaign, or the mass outrage after the Sharpeville massacre, or the school student's insurrection of 16 June 1976, or the successive campaigns under crippling repression to found and maintain illegal trade unions, or in the mass democratic uprisings from the mid-1980s until not long before the first democratic elections in 1994 that it WOULD NOT ACCEPT SERVITUDE and  it WOULD NOT ACCEPT DEFEAT.

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown", Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the dying King Henry IV, formerly the conqueror of his weak predecessor, Richard II, in a military coup in the English civil wars between rival dynastic houses in the late 14th century.

It was not a monarch at ease with his crown if his armed police were so poorly trained, or ill-commanded, that dissenting miners were hunted down behind the rocks at Small Koppie at Marikana like wild beasts, then killed in cold blood, to which Greg Marinovich provides compelling evidence.

Given the history of South Africa, with its age-long memory of massacres attached to infamous place-names, is it likely that this can be forgotten, and passed over in silence?

Surely it was a sign of weakness, not of strength, when the coronation of the monarch at Mangaung last month required to be engineered so crudely across the country that the Constitutional Court disallowed the practices of his courtiers in Free State, with a ruling issued two days before the ceremony?

And to build his palace among the rural hills at Nkandla, while a retinue of cronies receives rich benefices in a sea of homelessness, joblessness and poverty - was it really thought that in this republic, where the struggles for democracy were fought decade after decade with an intensity that made South Africa a flaming beacon to the world, was it really thought ... that nobody would notice?

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

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