Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Note
- FIRST KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Fragmentation and Cohesion in the ANC: The First 70 Years
- SECOND KEYNOTE ADDRESS: A Continuing Search for Identity: Carrying the Burden of History
- Chapter One One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Struggle History After Apartheid
- Chapter Two Religion And Resistance In Natal, 1900–1910
- Chapter Three Christianity and African Nationalism in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter Four Charlotte Maxeke: A Celebrated and Neglected Figure in History
- Chapter Five Imagining the Patriotic Worker: The Idea of ‘Decent Work’ in the ANC's Political Discourse
- Chapter Six Popular Movements, Contentious Spaces and the ANC, 1943–1956
- Chapter Seven Unravelling the 1947 ‘Doctors’ Pact’: Race, Metonymy and the Evasions of Nationalist History
- Chapter Eight The Politics of Language and Chief Albert Luthuli's funeral, 30 July 1967
- Chapter Nine Robben Island University Revisited
- Chapter Ten Shishita: A Crisis in the ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1980–811
- Chapter Eleven Comrade Mzwai
- Chapter Twelve Revisiting Sekhukhuneland: Trajectories of Former UDF Activists in Post-Apartheid South Africa
- Chapter Thirteen Regeneration of ANC Political Power, from the 1994 Electoral Victory to the 2012 Centenary
- Chapter Fourteen The ANC: Party Vanguard of the Black Middle Class?
- Chapter Fifteen Globalisation, Recolonisation and the Paradox of Liberation in Southern Africa
- Contributors
- Index
Chapter Eleven - Comrade Mzwai
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Note
- FIRST KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Fragmentation and Cohesion in the ANC: The First 70 Years
- SECOND KEYNOTE ADDRESS: A Continuing Search for Identity: Carrying the Burden of History
- Chapter One One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Struggle History After Apartheid
- Chapter Two Religion And Resistance In Natal, 1900–1910
- Chapter Three Christianity and African Nationalism in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter Four Charlotte Maxeke: A Celebrated and Neglected Figure in History
- Chapter Five Imagining the Patriotic Worker: The Idea of ‘Decent Work’ in the ANC's Political Discourse
- Chapter Six Popular Movements, Contentious Spaces and the ANC, 1943–1956
- Chapter Seven Unravelling the 1947 ‘Doctors’ Pact’: Race, Metonymy and the Evasions of Nationalist History
- Chapter Eight The Politics of Language and Chief Albert Luthuli's funeral, 30 July 1967
- Chapter Nine Robben Island University Revisited
- Chapter Ten Shishita: A Crisis in the ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1980–811
- Chapter Eleven Comrade Mzwai
- Chapter Twelve Revisiting Sekhukhuneland: Trajectories of Former UDF Activists in Post-Apartheid South Africa
- Chapter Thirteen Regeneration of ANC Political Power, from the 1994 Electoral Victory to the 2012 Centenary
- Chapter Fourteen The ANC: Party Vanguard of the Black Middle Class?
- Chapter Fifteen Globalisation, Recolonisation and the Paradox of Liberation in Southern Africa
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
‘Mzwandile Piliso … His name is known from Cape Horn to Cairo. For Africans he has become a symbol of the fighter for freedom of the Black Continent,’ wrote a Soviet journalist in an article devoted to this member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1970. The author's lack of knowledge of geography is obvious, and his knowledge of African politics was hardly adequate. To say that Piliso's name was known everywhere and that he had become a ‘symbol’ was definitely an exaggeration, although Piliso did become really well-known among those in Africa and beyond who were involved in supporting the South African liberation movement. Indeed, by the time the article was published in 1970, Mzwandile Piliso had become one of the well-known faces of the ANC in the international arena.
The journalist met ‘Comrade Mzwai,’ as Piliso was often called, in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), during an international conference to commemorate the centenary of Lenin's birth. This was just one of the many conferences Piliso attended in that period on behalf of the ANC. Incidentally, Piliso's presentation at the conference was noted by reactionary forces as far away as Australia. The newsletter of the Australian League of Rights, a far-right political organisation, drew attention to a paragraph in Piliso's speech:
With Lenin's ideas as a guide, the oppressed exploited people of South Africa are fighting for their liberation. Our main task is to abolish the fascist tyranny and establish a revolutionary democracy … Without the support we receive from the Socialist countries, particularly the Soviet Union … our struggle would have been inconceivable. The world national liberation movement will achieve complete victory only on the road illuminated by Lenin's ideas.
Piliso's involvement in the liberation struggle had begun ten years earlier. A week after the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960, Oliver Tambo, then ANC deputy president, left South Africa illegally and went to the United Kingdom. Reporting in Durban to the first national conference of the ANC after its unbanning in July 1991, Tambo said that the ANC's leadership had taken the decision to send him abroad even earlier, in 1959, ‘to rally international support for the isolation of the apartheid state’ and also ‘to create a reliable rear base for our struggle.’ Tambo recalled the aspirations and hardships of the first period of his exile: Those were hopeful and exciting days.
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- Information
- One Hundred Years of the ANCDebating Liberation Histories Today, pp. 255 - 274Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2012