Stephen Ellis - External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990

External Mission

The ANC in Exile, 19601990

Stephen Ellis

One thing the old and the new South Africa have in common is a passion for inventing history. History is not seen as a dispassionate inquiry into what happened, but rather as a part of political mobilisation promoting some form of collective self-interest.

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title
Ellis, Stephen
External Mission
ISBN 978-0-19-933-061-4 (hardback)

Printed in India
on Acid-Free Paper

O ne day in May 1948, a 30-year-old man, well groomed and well dressed in the fashion of the time, had an experience that marked him for life. He was a university graduate, a science teacher by profession, who just that month had been accepted for retraining as a solicitor, although a passerby observing the ritual scars on his cheeks could deduce that he had been born in a rural area into a traditional African family.

While he was walking down a street in Johannesburg, a white man accosted him and spat in his face.

The victim of this assault was Oliver Tambo, an activist in the African National Congress Youth League. Tambo recalled the event almost 40 years later while he was talking to a group of South African businessmen in one of a series of meetings with key sectors of the white establishment at a time when the African National Congress ( ANC ) was still illegal in South Africa. Tambo told them he still had the silk handkerchief with which he had wiped away the spit, a detail that suggests how deeply the incident disturbed him.