Oliver Tambo and the Dilemma of the Camp Mutinies in Angola in the|Eighties

Abstract

This article examines the dilemma facing Tambo in one of the most testing of times for the ANC. It explores the context and events that led to human rights abuses in the MK camps during the early 1980s in the face of serious and sustained attacks by the apartheid government. Some commentators have questioned the nature of Tambo’s response to this dark side of the ANC in exile. Based on extensive interviews over a number of years as well as an evaluation of the recent sequence of largely biographical literature on exile, the article examines the dilemma of reconciling the ANC’s commitment to human rights, with the increasingly mutinous behaviour of a number of MK soldiers in the Angolan camps.