Drawn into the Communist Party's social circles through friendships during the 1940s, Mandela became increasingly interested from 1952 onwards in the party's doctrines and in the Marxist canon that informed their premises. His first encounters with Communists were at a time when the party was beginning to develop its strategic justification for aligning itself with...

Drawn into the Communist Party's social circles through friendships during the 1940s, Mandela became increasingly interested from 1952 onwards in the party's doctrines and in the Marxist canon that informed their premises. His first encounters with Communists were at a time when the party was beginning to develop its strategic justification for aligning itself with...

Drawn into the Communist Party's social circles through friendships during the 1940s, Mandela became increasingly interested from 1952 onwards in the party's doctrines and in the Marxist canon that informed their premises. His first encounters with Communists were at a time when the party was beginning to develop its strategic justification for aligning itself with...

Drawn into the Communist Party's social circles through friendships during the 1940s, Mandela became increasingly interested from 1952 onwards in the party's doctrines and in the Marxist canon that informed their premises. His first encounters with Communists were at a time when the party was beginning to develop its strategic justification for aligning itself with...

Following Jacob Zuma's ascension to the presidency in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) has been dogged by rumours of escalating corruption and the personalization of power. This article documents these trends and explores three ways of understanding neo-patrimonialism in South Africa's ruling party. First, the article addresses the possibility that...

When it appeared in 1983, Black Politics in South Africa offered a revised interpretation of developments in black South African politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. In comparison to existing academic and popular writing on this topic, Black Politics proposed that ANC-led resistance had much less organisational coherence than represented conventionally and that t...

Since 1990 a rich body of autobiographical writing and interview testimony together with freshly available archival materials can support an assessment of the role played by South African communists in anti-apartheid opposition during the 1950s. Numbering only a few hundred, communists were very influential in leadership positions in the Congress Alliance and shape...

"...So much South African political biography is about secret things. Of course, political biography generally has long investigated intimate corners of private life. Since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, even when the focus in biographical writing is on the 'social self' of public personalities, their choices and decisions have been generally recognised to b...