The timing of this edition of Dawn is important for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the mid-1980s mark the beginning of a new, post-Kabwe (June 1985) era during which the Congress Alliance would escalate the struggle against apartheid. As Hani explained in ‘The Demand of the Time’, “1985 was a year of the biggest number of operations” in South Africa. To be sure, MK’s operations had “increased from around 50 in 1984 to 230 in 1986”. ^{1T. Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen, 124} According to Gregory Houston, writing for the liberation history project, South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET), this escalation was in response to an increasingly violent apartheid security force, which only two days before the Kabwe Conference had carried out a cross-border raid in Botswana, killing 12 people, including civilians. It was also in support of widespread uprisings in South Africa which had begun to take on a revolutionary character. ^{2G. Houston, The Road to Democracy in South Africa} From this perspective, then, we might understand Kabwe as a response to apartheid’s ‘Total War’ strategy, and as the catalyst for the ANC/SACP’s transition to a new stage of struggle, and this edition of Dawn as an assertion of the new party line.

However, other accounts highlight a different history that culminated in one of the most controversial events in ANC history; the Mkatashinga mutiny. ^{3There are contested narratives surrounding the Mkatashinga mutinies, many of which are covered in this teaching tool.} The prelude to the Mkatashinga mutiny began when the ANC were asked by the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) to help “defend Malanje province [in central Angola] from a series of attacks by UNITA” who were funded and supported by the apartheid regime. ^{4S. Davis, ‘Cosmopolitans in Close Quarters’, 52} The ANC duly obliged and put Chris Hani, Lennox Zuma, and Timothy Mokoena in charge of operations, which although initially a success, resulted in a high casualty rate and dissatisfaction within MK’s ranks. This prompted MK’s rank-and-file to demand in early 1984 that the ANC announce an “immediate halt to actions in Malanje province and… [to redeploy MK] against South African troops.”

What followed was a series of conflicts between MK’s rank-and-file and the Congress Alliance leadership, three separate mutinies of increasing intensity and violence, several executions and the torture and detention without trial of MK’s rebels. As Davis summarises, after years of ill-treatment by camp commanders and what from the rank-and-files’ perspective amounted to a stalled and neglected armed struggle, “[s]uspicion and indiscipline rose in tandem and reached crescendo in the Mkatashinga mutiny in late 1983 and early 1984 where nearly ninety percent of cadres in the camps rebelled, executed a few camp leaders, were suppressed by loyalists and Angolan forces, and several faced summary executions.”

In sharp contrast to ANC-oriented accounts such as that by SADET, which tend to frame the Mkatashinga mutiny as the result of apartheid state infiltrations and ‘unfortunate’ acts of indiscipline within an otherwise seamless transition to liberation, this alternative account suggests that these mutinies also stemmed from a longstanding, internal struggle between different political tendencies within the alliance. In this alternative account, also highlighted was a struggle between the leadership and the rank and file, whose members expressed an ever-present desire to take the struggle home to South Africa.

The author of this teaching tool positions ‘The Demand of the Time’ and this edition of Dawn ambiguously between these two contested and conflicting narratives. On the one hand, the author suggests reading it as a piece of political rhetoric designed to inspire and to motivate, to improve the moral of MK cadres who were either stationed in one of MK’s camps in exile or underground in South Africa, and to cultivate ‘sterling revolutionary fighters’ who could indeed take the struggle home to South Africa. While on the other, the author reads it as a vanguardist document, a propaganda piece, a discursive strategy designed to discipline the supposedly undisciplined cadre, and to maintain the limits of struggle and revolution in southern Africa. In short, calling on cadres to maintain discipline would have had as much to do with disciplining supposedly undisciplined cadres in Angola, as much to do with the Congress Alliance’s internal political struggle, as it was about preparing for military combat in South Africa. Or, put another way, during this period the Congress Alliance was not simply looking South and preparing MK for combat in South Africa. They were also looking West to Angola.

Reading between the lines and between these types of narratives is useful for a number of reasons. Firstly, it has the potential to nuance our understanding of political and military struggle, and to work against polarising discourses which position the ANC and its allies as either on the good or bad sides of history. This polarisation has the effect of either affirming the ANC as guarantors of freedom and democracy, as always already destined to become the new sovereign power after apartheid, or as framing the ANC and its allies as sell out, and in terms of betraying the revolutionary promise of South Africa and its people. This third way, the author suggests, enables a coming to terms with the reality that history and historical change is not teleologically or materially predetermined, and leaves history open to different futures. For it is clear that this issue of Dawn and broader histories of struggle within southern Africa are complex and contested, reflecting histories of factionalism, of vanguardism and elitism, but also of comradeship, immense personal sacrifice and genuine commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid regime. To merely frame this history in terms of betrayal or triumphalism does an injustice to lives of sacrifice and struggle and the experiences and legacies of the rank-and-file of political movements who largely remain silenced in the public domain.

This type of reading therefore also has the potential to nuance our understandings of political biographies and the political subject. After ANC President Oliver Tambo’s failed attempt to discipline mutineers in early 1984, Chris Hani was sent to negotiate with the mutineers, eventually persuading them to disarm. Shortly after this, however, and in what perhaps amounted to a betrayal of the mutineers and of Hani’s commitment to negotiations, “[t]he Committee of Ten [the rebels’ leaders] was taken into custody, some [were] imprisoned in Nova Instalação, a notorious Luanda prison, while others were sent to prison camps at Pango and Quibaxe, where, two months later, another mutiny occurred, this time followed by several casualties and seven executions”. ^{5S. Davis, ‘Cosmopolitans in Close Quarters’, 54}

Most ANC-aligned accounts of the Mkatashinga mutiny confirm this version of events, suggesting that Hani was the only leader who could bring rebelling cadres back to order. In a 1992 interview, Hani also spoke against the ANC’s Security Department and its excesses following the mutinies, and empathised with the mutineers’ position, particularly those placed in detention without trial, and of course those who had received summary executions.

However, there are also isolated accounts, such as that presented in a 1990 edition of Searchlight South Africa, where Hani was described as an uncompromising and authoritarian leader who threatened to have the mutineers executed. ^{6B. Ketelo et al, ‘A miscarriage of democracy’, 44} At other times, accusations of Hani’s tribalism, mobilised in order to fuel his rivalry with another leading figure of MK, Joe Modise, depicted a leader embroiled in an internal, factionalist struggle, and perhaps a leader who himself had a tendency toward cultural chauvinism, intellectual elitism, and political patronage. Perhaps most telling, however, was the account of the Douglas Commission, established by the ANC in the early 1990s to investigate potential human rights violations in exile, which concluded that “Hani was a leading figure in the reign of terror unleashed by the ANC/SACP on its members.”

Without dismissing the validity of the above claims, it seems that an either/or approach, which wrestles with the ‘Manichean problem’ of good and evil (depicting Hani as either hero or villain) fails to give nuance to the realities of struggle, and the different subject positions that Hani found himself in over time. In other words, to merely reduce Hani to an ideological caricature, fails to grasp the complexities of the anti-apartheid struggle as conducted by the ANC and its allies and fails to do justice to the political subject.

Instead the author proposes attending to these types of conflicting narratives, not as a means to reconcile the subject, the two Hanis (‘good’ and ‘evil’), nor to sacrifice either Hani to what Frederick Jameson refers to as a dialectical impasse: a “conventional opposition, in which one turns out to be more defective than the other one”, and through “which only one genuine opposite exists … [therefore sharing] the sorry fate of evil … reduced to mere reflection of its other”. ^{7Frederick Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 19} Instead, the author argues that placing these two Hanis – these two sides of struggle – into conversation with one another, and to treat them as “equally integral component[s]” of the life and legacy of Hani, and indeed his biographical makeup, might allow alternative readings that work against the mythologising, triumphalist and progressist discourses of the nation-state. ^{8Ibid. 20} In what follows the author of this teaching tool attempts to unravel these contested narratives and subject positions by engaging with the ways in which the idea of Hani as disciplined cadre par excellence was employed to both inspire and motivate MK cadres in exile, but also to discipline the supposedly undisciplined cadre particularly in the aftermath of the Mkatashinga mutiny.