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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Chris Hani's 'country bumpkins': regional networks in the African National Congress underground, 1974-1994
Author:Gibbs, TimothyISNI
Year:2011
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies (ISSN 1465-3893)
Volume:37
Issue:4
Pages:677-691
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:African National Congress (South Africa)
leadership
1970-1979
1980-1989
About person:Chris Thembisile Hani (1942-1993)ISNI
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070.2011.622947
Abstract:This article considers the social hinterland of leading members of the ANC underground who, raised in the Transkei, came of age in the late 1970s. Earlier in the twentieth century, South Africa's Native Reserves were wellsprings of nationalist leadership. Prominent ANC leaders shared a similar regionally focused set of familial, educational and professional connections that vaulted them to the centre of the nationalist movement. These regional networks remained important feeders for the ANC into the later apartheid era. Chris Hani recruited his leading cadres from a small pool of young men educated in Transkei's elite schools and earmarked for senior posts in the Bantustan bureaucracy. This social proximity of elite ANC cadres and leading Bantustan functionaries made the boundaries between opposition and collaboration permeable. While the ANC's attempted alliance with KwaZulu chief minister Buthelezi failed, hardening the distinction between militant nationalism and apartheid-corrupted ethnicity, its relationship with the Transkei's General Bantu Holomisa is a counter-example of the blurring of these political identities. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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