The African National Congress and the international community - 1960 to 1990

bibliographic database
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Book chapter

Title:	The African National Congress and the international community - 1960 to 1990
Author:	Ellis, Stephen
Book title:	Treading the waters of history: perspectives on the ANC
Year:	2014
Pages:	38-51
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	African National Congress (South Africa) anti-apartheid resistance communism international relations historiography
Abstract:	During its decades of exile, the ANC adopted a habit of strategic deception as it hid the true extent of its communist allegiance in order to gain support in the Western world. The most influential allies in the ANC's thirty-year armed struggle against the apartheid State were from the Soviet bloc. This connection collapsed at the end of the cold war, other than perhaps in regard to Cuba, one of the few pro-Soviet regimes to survive intact. Rather than re-examining its history to sort fact from fiction or myth from reality, the ANC has buried itself ever more deeply into a romantic myth of struggle, apparently seeing itself as the champion of a Third World that in fact no longer exists and the spearhead of an African revolution that actually lost its way years ago. The author contends that historians have a duty to describe the past as they now perceive it, based on the facts they were able to identify. In doing so they contribute, whether or not they know it, to the well-being of the national community. [ASC Leiden abstract]