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AFRICA TODAY A Multi-Disciplinary Snapshot of the Continent in 1995 Edited by Peter F. Alexander, Ruth Hutchison and Deryck Schreuder THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CANBERRA 1996

PAC of Azania (A4)

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An account of the history of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa), the chief political party rival to the African National Congress from 1959-1986, written by a liberation lieutenant-general who facilitated the 178 strong first African guerrilla incursion into South Africa in 1979.

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AFRICA TODAY

A Multi-Disciplinary Snapshot of the Continent in 1995

Edited by Peter F. Alexander, Ruth Hutchison

and Deryck Schreuder

THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

CANBERRA 1996

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Humanities Research Centre Monograph Series No. 12, Australian National University ISBN No. 0 7315 2491 8 First published 1996 Copyright © 1996 Cover: John Muafangejo, Angola 1943-Namibia 1987, also worked in South Africa Men are working in town 1981, linocut, 59.6 x 41.8; 74 x 59.8 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1992. Copyright 1995 John Muafangejo. Copyright licences to be applied to JMT, 4 Caudwells Castle, 5 Folly Bridge, Oxford OX 1 4LB. Cover Design by Jodi Parvey Layout and Design by Misty Cook and Jodi Parvey Printed in Australia by Goanna Press, Fyshwick, Canberra

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ILLUSTRATIONS KEYNOTE PAPER D. A. Low: Independence and Tropical Africa's Political Trauma 1 HISTORY John Omer-Cooper: South African History in Perspective 19 Christopher Saunders: Reflections on the South African Transition 55 Patrick Chabal: The (De) Construction of the Postcolonial Political Order in Black Africa 69 F. A. Mouton: 'A Cusser when Crossed': The Turbulent Career of William Ballinger 79 John Lambert: Chiefly Collaboration in Colonial Natal. Case Studies of Phakacle kaMacingwane and Thetheleku kaNobanda 101

THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA Heribert Adam: Deeply Divided or Pragmatically United? Comparing Prospects of Democracy in Post-apartheid South Africa 127 Jonathan Hyslop: Why was the White Right Unable to Stop South Africa's Democratic Transition? 145 Bernard Leeman: The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania 167

LITERATURE Christine Alexander: Imagining Africa: The Brontes' Creation of Glass Town and Angri 201 Sue Kossew: Rlpresenting the Afrikaner: Andre Brink and the Politics of Representation 221 Ray Younis: Songs of Travail, Songs of Enchantment: Colonialist and Post-colonialist Discourses in Contemporary Language and Literature 233 IMAGES OF AFRICA Saul Dubow: Human Origins, Race Typology and the Other Raymond Dart 245 Pal Ahluwalia: The Rwandan Crisis: Exile and Nationalism Reconstructed 281

POLITICS Pal Ahluwalia and Paul Nursey-Bray: Uganda: State and Civil Society 303 Geoffrey Wood and Richard Haines: The Remaking of Mozambique: The Impact of the 1994 Elections and the Prospects. for Social and Economic Recovery 327 Phillip Darby and Albert Paolini: African Futures 345 Cherry Gertzel: Why Won't the Wars Stop? An Examination of the Relationship between Resource Scarcity, Inequality and Conf1iet in Somalia and Rwanda in the

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Late Twentieth Century 365

WOMEN Kogila Moodley: Colonizers, Settlers, Nationalists and Women 395 P. Stavropoulos: Women and Agency in Colonial African Contexts 417 Tanya Lyons and David Moore: Written in the Revolutions: (Mis)Representations, the Politics of Gender and the Zimbabwean National War 443

HEALTH AND MEDICINE David Lucas, Lawrence Ikamari, Tapiwa Jhamba and Chilumba Nalwamba: A Provincial View of Fertility and Mortality Change in Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe 479

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21 BOOK REVIEWS (Professor Donald Denoon) Peter Alexander, Ruth Hutchison and Deryck Schreuder (eds) Africa Today: a Multi-Disciplinary Snapshot of the continent in 1995, Canberra. Humanities Research Centre, ANU, 1996, 589pp. ISBN 07315 2491 8. no price stated.

ANU's Humanities Research Office organised three major conferences during ‘Africa

Year’, 1995. Africa Today presents the proceedings of the third contemporary conference. This volume is handsomely and professionally presented and illustrated, and sees the light remarkably soon after its conception- It is plainly not possible to do justice to 28 papers, ranging through history, politics, literature, film, gender, health and environmental issues. Predictably, their quality is uneven and the connections between the papers little developed. Few could emulate the broad sweep of Anthony Low’s keynote review of ‘Independence and Tropical Africa’s Political Trauma although Patrick Chabal rises to the occasion in his analysis of the post-colonial political order, Sau1 Dubow’s exploration of Raymond Dart and the evolution of race typologies is continent-wide in its implications, Cherry Gertzel develops a general theory by examining the wars in Rwanda and Somalia, and the discussions of gender also aspire to continental judgments. The more closely-focused papers are perfectly appropriate for a conference, but difficult to read sequentially in print. Predictably again, ten papers investigate South African topics, four of them in the History section. Together with three papers on The New South Africa' (by Heribert Adam, Jonathan Hyslop and Bernard Leeman) these come closest to an interactive series.

One of the most remarkable is Bernard Leeman's very personal account of the Pan

Africanist Congress of Azania, to which he has devoted touch of his adult life. The PAC’s perspective on South African politics is cogent, even if the institution's policies have developed in a convoluted and sometimes opportunistic fashion. Membership of the PAC and its affiliates often seems to reflect a radical temperament rather than a commitment to specific strategies, tactics or outcomes. Given the many organisational and tactical failings of the African National Congress, when it and its allies were the only rivals of the PAC, the decline of the 1atter deserves the serious attention which Leeman gives to it. The intimate connections with Lesotho politics and the fateful personality clashes among the leaders are described in detail, as in the PAC’s calamitous performance in South Africa’s first democratic elections. Throughout its forty years the PAC has settled into the role of critic of the ANC, a function which seems certain to persist.

Jonathan Hyslop’s analysis of the South African `white right' and its ultimate failure

either to coalesce or to prevent the democratic transition, suggests some of the reasons why the PAC's role may again become important. To avoid the risk of bloodshed, the ANC was bound not only to seek an accommodation with the ruling National Party, but also to offer a role to Constand Viloen’s Freedom Front; yet any conciliatory gesture laid it open to PAC and other radical criticism. Had the PAC been as powerful as its 1980s rhetoric promised, that conciliatory strategy might have been politically impossible - and the consequences of a direct confrontation too alarming to contemplate.

Another paper which caught my attention because it addresses my earlier research interest and analysis and is a highly topical issue, is Pal Ahluwalia-s analysis of ‘The Rwanda crisis’. Events have rather overtaken this analysis, with tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees being driven on death marches through eastern Zaire, and a Rwandan-backed insurgency.

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9

THE PAN AFRICANIST CONGRESS OF AZANIA

Bernard Leeman

Lieutenant-General, Azanian People’s Liberation Army, Education Secretary, Pan Africanist Congress of Azania

The ideological roots of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC)

included two of the most original and talented intellectuals of their generation, Anton Muziwakhe Lembede and Ashley Peter Solomzi Mda, while a third, Stephen Bantu Biko, was murdered while negotiating to become the party's deputy leader and heir apparent. Within a year of the foundation of the PAC in 1959 the party had not only captured the support and imagination of African youth but had also persuaded world opinion to treat the National Party (NP) minority regime in South Africa as a pariah. By 1963 its military operations seriously threatened the security of the south-east corner of the country and by 1978 it had trained two guerrilla armies in exile, launching one of them into Lesotho the following year. In 1994, the PAC, a party historically identified with the landless, the oppressed, youth, and the unemployed, won a mere 1.2 percent of the vote in the South African election, in which the African National Congress (ANC), a party associated with the employed, the urban elite and compromise, took office with the NP. This paper examines the reasons for these extraordinary extremes in the fortunes of the PAC.

The first question to answer is why was the PAC necessary? Why did its founding members consider the ANC an inadequate organisation to lead the African political struggle?

By the 1940s, there was general dissatisfaction among the rising African generation with the ANC and Communist Party (CPSA). The ANC Christian liberal dream of assimilation had been shattered by the 1936 Land Act and crippling of the Cape franchise, while the CPSA had been discredited by the Soviet Union's pacts with Britain, France and Nazi Germany, and the Comintern's disbanding of Padmore's International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW). After deciding against forming a new political party, Anton Lembede (1914-47), an intellectual from a poverty-stricken Zulu background, revived and invigorated the almost moribund ANC in 1944 when he formed its Youth League. He concluded that Africans would be better served by policies of mass action and self-reliance and founded the School of African Nationalism with Ashley P. Mda, in Orlando East, an institution attended even by future opponents of the Africanists, such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. Mda had joined Kadalie's ICU in its dying days and also the CPSA, quitting over its refusal to implement the Black Republic policy, and took over leadership of the Africanists after Lembede's death in 1947. Mda suffered from poor health and lacked Lembede's dynamism but by 1950, when he retired from the leadership of the Youth League, never again to stand for political office, he had succeeded in winning over many adherents from the African intellectual elite at University College, Fort Hare, to the Africanist Movement.

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Mda wanted to create a modern version of the Southern African initiation lodge, a clandestine, powerful and influential peer group to whom even the most prominent African leaders would be answerable. He ostensibly worked for a long-term strategy which kept the leading Africanists out of mainstream ANC politics, claiming that the Africanists were too young, too few, and too inexperienced to make a significant impact at such an early stage, but they gained a partial success with the adoption in 1949 of a diluted version of their demands in the Programme of Action. However, Mda's group's refusal to stand for office cost the movement dearly, allowing Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo to make an early impact on the ANC and paving the way for their eventual leadership.

Although Mda s Africanists were active during the 1952 Defiance Campaign, the reluctance of Mda and other intellectuals to undertake grass-roots agitation would have probably doomed the Africanist Movement to be nothing more than a small but respected pressure group similar to the Trotskyist Unity Movement but for the grass-roots agitation of Potlako Leballo, an ex-soldier from Lesotho. Members of the Africanist Inner Circle were reluctant to allow a mass leadership to develop. Burgess, unjustly criticising Sobukwe, did identify this phenomenon when he wrote:

Leballo and Madzunya were more concerned with propagating Africanism in order to

incite mass action than with projecting a correct ideological image. The petty bourgeois intellectuals such as A. P. Mda and M. R. Sobukwe, encouraged African mass involvement but intended that the leadership of the Africanists remain under the control of the intelligentsia. The notion persisted among the Africanists that the educated intellectuals had to play the leading role in guiding the mobilised African masses towards liberation and in properly defining the Africanist ideology.1

Until Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe became a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Africanists did not have a leader of professional stature to match those who had traditionally led the ANC and CPSA. The Defiance Campaign boosted ANC party membership from about 25,000 to over 100,000 but the changing post-war social conditions in the Transvaal townships was bringing new types of leaders to prominence, ones that were from less prestigious backgrounds-teachers, petty entrepreneurs, ex-soldiers and clerks. P. K. Leballo was from this new group and despite academic interest in Sobukwe, the history of the PAC belongs more to Leballo, whose political career had important consequences not only for South Africa but also Lesotho. Leballo was born a chief in the south-west Lesotho village of Lifelakoaneng overlooking the Basotho 'lost Lands' in the Orange Free State and his political outlook was largely governed by his Basotho background. He saw the problems of Lesotho and South Africa as indivisible and until 1960 led the strongest and wealthiest branch of the Basutoland Congress Party (BCP) while remaining prominent in the African National Congress (ANC) and founding the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). His propagation of a Pan-Africanist political party was ostensibly in line with Padmore's Ghanaian based Pan African version of the Comintern but solved his own dilemma of wishing to be active in the affairs both of Basutoland and South Africa. The PAC had a predominantly Basotho membership and members often switched between BCP and PAC and their military wings. The only two White members of the PAC had Basotho backgrounds and close friendships with the Basutoland political hierarchy.2 Leballo's Basotho connections revived

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the PAC's fortunes in the 1970s. This link enabled the party to challenge the ANC in exile as well as threaten the Basotho National Party (BNP) regime in Lesotho; and Leballo's early death in 1986 was due to his hypertension incurred through his success in splitting the Lesotho military-BNP alliance and blackmailing General Lekhanya into a coup.3

Leballo's generation in Basutoland was proud of its heritage as being the only people in southern Africa to hold out against White invasion and regain relative independence in the

1880--84 Gun War when they defeated the Cape forces. There was a justified belief among the Basotho that, if they had been allowed access to the Cape gunpowder market in the nineteenth century fight for western Lesotho, they would have defeated the Orange Free State Boers and kept their fertile lands. Secondly, although British meddling was to throw the whole system of the Basotho chieftainship into chaos by the mid-1930s, the Basotho of Leballo's generation still had confidence in their highly democratic rural society of communal labour and land tenure. Leballo had no illusions about Arcadian idylls but had an understanding of and faith in southern Africa's rural poor. He believed that if political leaders stood with the lowest strata of society they could achieve and be anything they wanted. To a certain extent he thought more in Basotho than South African terms, of turning South Africa into a greater Lesotho from which all the paraphernalia of the complex capitalist urban and decadent feudal rural White society would be swept away.

Leballo attended Lembede's school and became an ardent Africanist. After the 1949 Programme of Action conference he joined both Mda's Hard Core and Inner Circle groups within the Africanist Movement.4

The Defiance Campaign received most support in the traditional ANC heartland of the Eastern Cape with its liberal Christian political tradition, but the mass expansion of the party after the campaign testified to the challenge of the townships around Pretoria and Johannesburg where the population was younger, more radical and less accommodating. Draconian NP legislation terminated the United Party policy of permitting near assimilation of highly educated Africans and this not only closed the path for the African elite to share many privileges enjoyed by Whites, but forced them to turn to African support to regain what they had lost, a role which many disliked and for which they were ill-suited. Unable to compete with agitators such as Leballo and Josias Madzunya, the new ANC leaders found common cause with the clandestine Communist Party, which drew on decades of international experience in speaking for and controlling mass movements without being answerable to them. At the same time, the new ANC leader, Lutuli, was restricted to his farm in Natal and unable to exercise his authority effectively in the Transvaal where the future of the ANC was being decided.

Although Africans formed the majority of the CPSA membership and had accomplished some important political work such as the 1946 Miners' strike, the party leadership was overwhelmingly White and from the professions. Indubitably dedicated and hardworking, the Communist Party leadership remained strangely detached from the gut feelings of the African population, as evidenced by its pronouncement as late as 1962 that 'Africans live in every part of our country'. In 1950 the party voluntarily disbanded to escape prosecution under new legislation and therefore could not campaign openly for support, even though it reconstituted itself secretly as the South African Communist

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Party (SACP) at the beginning of 1953. The party was more suited to a clandestine role since it strongly identified with Lenin's What is to be Done? theory that ten professional revolutionaries were better than a hundred 'fools'. This secretive role isolated the SACP leadership further from township life, and their work of cultivating African leaders in their homes in the more prosperous suburbs of Johannesburg brought ridicule and contempt from Leballo and other agitators. The ANC leadership of Lutuli, Tambo, Sisulu and Mandela became increasingly elitist for although they represented a new generation, psychologically they belonged to the pre-1940s era before the party became a mass movement. They wished to speak for the African masses but were averse to dealing with them on an equal footing. As Africanist support grew through Leballo's work in the 1950s, the ANC and SACP leaderships joined together into an increasingly undemocratic elitist clique to combat this new phenomenon of Africans from less prestigious backgrounds demanding a greater say in how the party should be run.

The strategy chosen to neutralise the Africanists was initiated in 1953 by the ANC Cape leader, Professor Z. K. Matthews, who sought a larger role for minority groups in anti-apartheid agitation. Matthews' call for a Congress of the People which would adopt a Freedom Charter was unsuccessfully opposed by the Africanists, who considered the Programme of Action an adequate statement of national objectives. Critics were denied funds to travel to, or (in the case of Leballo) banned from, vital meetings, while Lutuli formalised close links in March 1954 with the Indian Congress, the newly formed (White) Congress of Democrats (COD) and the Coloured Peoples Organisation (SACPO), followed in 1955 by the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). All four of these organisations had secretary-generals belonging to the clandestine SACP while Sisulu, the ANC secretary general, and the ANCYL leaders elected in June 1954, Joe Matthews and Duma Nokwe, were associated with the Moscow-oriented faction of the party.5 A National Action Council (NAC) was established consisting of two representatives from each of the four organisations (ANC, SAIC, SACPO and COD) to prepare the Freedom Charter and Congress of the People. The SACP publication New Age gave the venture wide publicity but also confirmed the Africanists' fears of SACP manipulation by printing the resolutions of the ANC Annual Conference of 1954 before the conference even convened. By the time the Congress of the People convened in June 1955, Lutuli had been marginalised. The Charter was written by Joe Slovo and other White SACP leaders and distributed by the thousand before the Congress of the People met, preventing amendments. Neither Lutuli nor Dr William Conco, his representative at the Congress of the People, saw the Freedom Charter before it was adopted by acclaim.6

The ANC's adoption of the Freedom Charter seriously weakened the party and cost it the support of the younger generation of politicised Africans. The Charter declared that there should be 'equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races.' In accordance with this resolution, the ANC, SACPO, SAIC, COD and the newly formed SACTU were created equal partners in an ANC Congress Alliance, each organisation having one member in the Executive. This structure was duplicated right down the national structure to the branches, thus relegating the 100,000 strong ANC to a position equal to the less than

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500 strong COD. The clandestine SACP therefore controlled four of the five positions on the executive and Slovo consolidated the SACP grip by using his powers on the Allied Disciplinary Committee to expel ANC members from the ANC for protesting against the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter. Qhobela Molapo, the future Lesotho Foreign Minister, at that time working for New Age, stated,

The African National Congress was just used. I'm sorry to say this. It was just used

by the other, smaller organisations. I'm not questioning the sincerity of the people who sat in other bodies like SACTU and COD-I would hate to give that impression-but ... at National Executive level-that is, in regard to the Congress Alliance-the African National Congress was not given its proper due in view of the preponderance in membership. Even at national level, very few people knew what the Freedom Charter was about.7

The Freedom Charter only supported a universal franchise specifically

linked to the multi-racial executive structure. This was not an oversight for Oliver Tambo emphasised this point when he rewrote the ANC Constitution in 1957.

Lutuli was now placed in a dilemma, unable at first to accept the Freedom Charter but unwilling to commit himself to the 'uncouth' but democratic demands of the Africanists, whom he ostensibly opposed on Christian grounds, equating their attacks on the SACP with racism and McCarthyism. He and other ANC leaders of his outlook decided at length to support the Freedom Charter and adhere to the strategy of building up a multi-racial professional elite able to direct African agitation in order eventually to present itself for support the Freedom Charter and adhere to the strategy of building up a multi-racial professional elite able to direct African agitation in order eventually to present itself for election to parliament. This 'direction from above' contrasted with the Africanists' 'direction from below' associated with Leballo and Madzunya. The Charterists (supporters of the Freedom Charter) were deeply worried that Africanist agitation would inflame unknown rural forces who, combining with volatile township elements and tsotsis, would bring open racial conflict, in which they would have no relevance.

The Congress Alliance attempt to exclude the Africanists from influencing ANC policy was thwarted by the Treason Trial of 1956-61, which removed 156 members of anti-government organisations from the scene and left many key ANC positions in the hands of heavy-handed, corrupt or incompetent administrators, who were unable to deal effectively with rising Africanist criticism of the effects of the Freedom Charter. By the end of 1957 the Transvaal ANC was in crisis and as 1958 progressed Sobukwe, Leballo and Madzunya were in full cry, firstly against the acting local leadership and then the national leadership itself. In November the Africanists were forcibly prevented from attending the Transvaal Conference and the next month, after deliberations with the BCP leader, Ntsu Mokhehle, in Basutoland, the decision was taken to form a new party. Mokhehle stated later:

Mr Potlako Leballo was the BAC Provincial Secretary in the Transvaal when they

started the PAC-the decision to break away from the ANC was taken in Maseru before me-and Leballo was the link between the Pan Africanist group in the ANC and BAC. From the Transvaal Provincial Secretary, Leballo easily became the Secretary-General-this we did to keep the PAC-BAC links strong and it continued until 1960. Leballo is the real founder of the PAC-and he is the man who decided, promoted and sponsored Sobukwe's presidency of the PAC-some ignorant people may be startled by this and tend

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to challenge it-but it just happens to be true-here much of what I say took place before me and, to a greater extent than not with my help. 8

The formation of the Pan Africanist Congress in April 1959 removed the younger, more militant membership from the ANC to such an extent that when guerrilla war began, after Sharpeville, Mandela, the Umkhonto we Sizwe commander, had to rely on SACP Whites to organise and run the ANC's new military wing. 9

Leballo had also had over eight years experience as the leader of the Transvaal Province of the Basutoland Congress Party, its most powerful, wealthy and militant branch. The BCP had seized the political initiative through its agitation against British directed administrative reform which it believed was aimed at facilitating incorporation of the protectorate into South Africa. In January 1960 the BCP won the first legislative assembly elections held in the country, as well as gaining control of eight of the nine local government district councils. It humiliated the elitist Progressive Party, which disbanded after the election, and the Canadian Catholic missionary creation, the Basotho National Party, which represented the minor chieftaincy. Through Ntsu Mokhehle, the PAC had established a link with the All Africa People's Convention (AAPC), of which he was a member of the Steering Committee. In addition, Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader, sent funds to launch the PAC. 1960 was the year in which many African countries became independent, and the Africanists noted with satisfaction that in places such as Tanganyika multi-racial elitist parties were heavily defeated in national elections. It seemed that the ANC's external links and elite multi-racial alliances would serve them worse than the Pan African popularist approach of the Africanists. The Pan Africanist Congress was founded at a conference on 6 and 7 April 1959. The new party identified the White power structure, the Union, as being responsible for African misery. The PAC declared that reforming the White state was a worthless task as it was basically evil and should be replaced by a democratic socialist African structure which would unite with the rest of Africa into a single United States of Africa. The party acknowledged that while the PAC respected Christianity and Marxism, the party had been forced to reject their messages as the path to liberation because of the self-serving anti-democratic behaviour of their representatives in South Africa. Leballo, Sobukwe and Madzunya were the leading candidates for the post of party president. Leballo nominated Sobukwe, who was elected unopposed, and then secured the post of secretary general. Madzunya was elected treasurer but his votes were switched with those of A. B. Ncgobo, because the new leaders, including Leballo, believed he would incapable of undertaking such administrative work." This alienated Madzunya and his considerable following in Alexandra township. Of the PAC National Executive Committee (NEC) five were from a Xhosa background, six Sotho, and four Zulu. Mda did not stand for office but retained his enormous influence over his protégés. At least nine of the fourteen NEC members had some university education, and another later took a degree but many of the party members were young unemployed urban males, who despised the Westernised middle class but felt themselves above manual labour, and represented the 'illiterate and semi-literate African masses' the PAC intended to inspire into seizing power.

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Leballo stated that he feared he would be nominated for the post of president and win it. He believed the party needed an intellectual, which is why he successfully nominated Sobukwe, thus establishing some sort of record since he had nominated Lutuli, the ANC leader, in 1952. Other commentators, such as Burgess, speculated that a desire within the new party to show they could match the ANC leadership's educational attainment put Leballo in jeopardy of winning any seat on the NEC. Certainly the composition of the new NEC was a warning signal for the future when PAC leaders tried appealing to the ANC's preserve, the relatively prosperous urban African elite, instead of to the lower strata of society.

Until 1959 Leballo had been cast as the perpetual rebel. Now, as PAC secretary-general, he undertook a new role. Within three months he oversaw the expansion of the party to 24,664 members dispersed throughout 101 branches. Progress slowed somewhat but by December the ANC expressed disquiet at the new figures of 31,035 members in 153 branches and a new trade union movement, 17,000 strong.

Pressure to achieve results to give the party and its leaders credibility, to upstage the ANC/SACP, and to work for continental freedom by 1963, as propagated by the AAPC in Ghana, propelled the PAC into early action. The PAC chose the Pass Laws as their target for nation-wide protest. They intended to set an example, to be copied nationally, of presenting themselves for arrest for refusing to carry passes, hoping that thousands upon thousands of Africans would swamp the police stations and courts, a process that would lead to strikes, chaos and the rapid breakdown of White government.

Leballo urged the party to prepare for inevitable violence but Sobukwe insisted on passive resistance, although the party membership was young, volatile, impatient and thus ill-suited to such a role.

The Sharpeville massacre occurred within hours of the PAC launching its campaign on 21 March 1960, and was followed by riots and more killing. Although the Pass laws were suspended on 26 March, too many levels of the PAC leadership had been arrested for the party to maintain adequate direction of the national campaign. On 30 March the party lost its greatest opportunity to make a significant impact when the PAC West Cape regional secretary, Philip Kgosana, dismissed his 30,000 followers from the centre of Cape Town and thus lost the power to bargain for concessions. On 8 April both PAC and ANC were banned.

The Poqo rising had already broken out in the eastern Cape by the time Leballo escaped to Lesotho from restriction in Tongaland in August 1962.11 The PAC's Cape branches instigated some of the violence but also linked up with peasants who were attacking chiefs and other government officials in the Transkei.

Leballo became acting PAC president with Sobukwe's assent and when Zephaniah Mothopeng arrived in Maseru after completion of his jail term, he brought Sobukwe's agreement for armed conflict. In October Leballo managed to get a plane out of Maseru over flying South Africa and was disturbed to find the external missions had done little to organise military training. Only a few troops were undertaking training in Egypt. Nevertheless, Nkrumah supplied the PAC with a Swedish freighter which was then loaded with arms in Egypt. Violence escalated late in 1962.

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Transkei chiefs were assassinated, and a mass PAC attack at Paarl killed two White policemen. Nkrumah's ship was due to rendezvous with Poqo on the Transkei coast and although it reached the Indian Ocean in early 1963 and visited Madagascar, it then vanished, reputedly sold for a profit by persons unknown, although suspicion fell on Vus Make, who later achieved notoriety as a particularly corrupt official. The failure to supply arms to Poqo undermined resistance, which remained strong in the Cape but was not adequately backed in the Transvaal. In February five Whites were murdered at a camp site. In March the PAC agreed to launch a national rising on 8 April, and on 21 March, Sharpeville Day, the party said the time was ripe for a 'Knock-out blow' against the White population and warned that women and children might suffer in the coming violence.

This period was the most controversial of Leballo's career, and centres on a press conference he and the PAC publicity secretary, Z. B. Molete, gave in Maseru on 24 March 1963 to a single journalist behind closed doors which critics claim betrayed the whole rising by alerting the police and enabling them to capture documents identifying thousands of militants. However, the events of that period do not match such a scenario. First of all a sense of panic had already afflicted White South Africa. Parliament had been told that security in the Transkei was deteriorating, despite the establishment of Home Guard units in every town as well as thirty-five towns in the rest of the country. Judge Snyman's commission had called for 'drastic steps' to be taken because 'Poqo was stronger than ever'. 12 The opposition United Party had been critical of the National Party regime for being too slow in dealing with Poqo. Leballo wanted to maintain the feeling of panic and in this he succeeded. Patrick Duncan, who served the PAC as its representative in Algeria, speculated that Leballo, with historical precedents to guide him, may have hoped for South African retaliation against Lesotho, which would force the British to commit troops. 13 Nkrumah's success in hounding South Africa out of the Commonwealth, and alerting world opinion against the NP regime, gave the PAC hope of external aid. The day after the press conference the Rand Daily Mail had a banner headline 'Black Wave Nears' with Leballo's claim that Poqo was 155,000 strong, divided into 1,000 cells waiting the word to attack, while Die Burger announced the police and army were standing by and John Vorster, the Minister of Justice, had assured parliament that action was imminent. Soon after the press conference, two PAC couriers were arrested with 70 letters from Leballo warning PAC activists to exercise extreme caution.

On 1 April any hope of the British protecting the PAC against South African aggression was obliterated when the British-led police in Basutoland raided PAC headquarters in Maseru. Leballo escaped with the help of a Mosotho policeman and was taken to hide at Ha Tsiu, on the outskirts of Maseru, by Mokhehle and Pokela. Seventy-three arrests resulted from the capture of the letters, followed by 3,246 more, which gives rare credence to one of the claims in Gordon Winter's universally condemned book that a list of 4,000 PAC/Poqo activists had been copied from PAC headquarters before the raid.14

The Maseru raid marked the end of Leballo's attempt to direct an armed rising in South Africa from a local base and any faith he had of the British aiding the African struggle. When he eventually emerged from hiding five months later, Poqo had been crushed and the British deported him from

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Basutoland, his birthplace, under South African pressure in August 1964. Basutoland was already in political turmoil as the BCP fought for early independence, while combating well financed SACP coup attempts on the BCP leadership and creation of two Moscow-allied rival parties. The British introduced paramilitary forces in all three protectorates at the end of 1963 to combat anti-South African insurgency and one reason for Leballo's expulsion was to prevent him standing as a BCP candidate, like Robert Matji of the ANC, in the pre-independence elections. Other consequences of the BCP's cooperation with the PAC during Poqo were British efforts to bolster the royalist Marematlou Freedom Party, and the South African-Canadian missionary alliance to revive the Basotho National Party (BNP). The BNP won the 1965 pre-independence election on a minority vote through support from the female Catholic population and a ban on voting for the thousands of Basotho working in South Africa. The new government accepted a single citizenship policy and when Leballo traded in his British passport for a Lesotho one, the BNP administration kept the former and refused to issue the latter.15

Leballo was ill-suited to exile, especially after the 1966 coup in Ghana. The Pan African ideal was fatally wounded through military coups throughout the continent and a crack-down on Pan Africanist revolutionaries such as John Okello, the Ugandan who overthrew the Arab regime in Zanzibar. The ANC/SACP alliance prospered in such conditions, able to relate well to the new increasingly undemocratic African elites and the governing circles of the western and eastern blocs, while Leballo, in his element as a grass-roots activist, found exile a living death. Leballo established the Azanian People's Liberation Army under Templeton Ntantala, the party having accepted the name of Azania for the country to symbolise the alternative state they wished to create in place of the White republic. About a hundred recruits went for training in Ghana, Egypt, and Algeria, while more went to China at a later date. With Mda silent, Sobukwe confined on Robben Island and Pokela kidnapped in 1967, Leballo undertook the PAC's ideological transformation in exile as best he could and turned to Maoism.

The Chinese experience had not figured to any significant extent in the Africanist movement, mainly because of censorship. Sobukwe, studying at Fort Hare in the late-1940s had found it difficult even to obtain Edward Roux's Time Longer than Rope 16 while Ntsu Mokhehle stated that most of the available CPSA literature had been translated into stilted English. While some commentators criticised the PAC for the move to Maoism, Leballo felt vindicated to a certain extent by the success of the BCP in opposition in Lesotho. While the BCP hierarchy was active in parliament exposing the inadequacies of the inept BNP government, the lower echelons of the party controlled the local government district councils and showed that peasant directed communal enterprises had more success than those initiated by foreign experts in alliance with the undemocratic minor chieftaincy. Maoism provided lessons Leballo believed applicable to the PAC's dilemma of how to adjust to exile. The Poqo rising and other manifestations of violent hatred of foreign domination were comparable to the Taiping, Nian and Boxer risings in China, where brutal behaviour had alienated peasants and townspeople alike. Mao's Red Army guerrillas had won support and admiration through their

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deliberate policy of paying for goods, helping with problems, and bringing a better administration than the one they were fighting. Mao's New Democracy also challenged the orthodox revolutionary path espoused by Moscow and the SACP. Following massacres in the cities and further disasters incurred from trying to capture urban centres in line with Stalin's instructions, Mao concluded that the revolution should be led and supported by all classes, not just the industrial proletariat, national capitalists, and intellectual patriots. In the event, the peasantry were recruited and trained in the Red Army to bring about a successful revolution. Next, Mao chose a base at Yan’an in the remote north-west of China where the Red Army University gave basic practical training to all ranks, while at the same time emphasising that each soldier had something unique to contribute to the revolution. In addition, Beijing was not recognised as the legitimate government of China by the United States, which appealed to Leballo, the perpetual outsider. Lastly, Beijing, while supporting armed revolution by the oppressed, was quick to criticise excesses by the elites of newly independent countries.

The shift to Maoism exacerbated the strains within the PAC exiled leadership. Some felt that it reflected poorly on the party that Leballo was neither a university graduate nor a commissioned army officer. Secondly, Leballo did not drink and disliked socialising. Like Lembede, he found elite African society decadent. This writer found that outside party work Leballo was happiest reading military history, particularly on Rommel. He avoided the cocktail circuit and was frustrated with the lack of urgency and commitment he encountered with the post-independence leadership. He worked hard and demanded standards, particularly punctuality, from his followers. This writer witnessed Leballo's frequent agitation if someone was late by even less than a minute for an appointment or rendezvous, and often had to rewrite drafts for speeches or publications for him at short notice. This style of leadership was not popular with many exiles, who, for the first time in their lives, could relax without fear of police harassment and enjoy opportunities denied them in South Africa. These ranged from scholarships to inter-racial sex. Leballo arrived in Dar es Salaam in September to establish the party's external headquarters under the supervision of the OAU Liberation Committee, founded there in 1963. Immediately he faced attempts to oust him as leader by status-conscious members of the PAC hierarchy who sneered at him as a tsotsi-an uneducated thug. There were already over ten external PAC representatives and they were more interested in personal advancement than recruiting and arranging training for APLA. Burgess stated:

In exile, the tendency towards self-advancement had turned many former reliable and

dynamic PAC members into self-seeking and corrupt individuals.17

Peter 'Molotsi and Nana Mahomo were suspended in February 1964 for

squandering resources. In October A. B. Ncgobo was investigated for misappropriation as was Nyaose, the trade union leader in July 1965. In April 1966 Peter Raboroko and A. B. Ncgobo were investigated for mismanagement. In 1966 relative stability had been restored and the party absorbed members of the Coloured People's Congress who had rejected the ANC reformist approach. Patrick Duncan, son of a former Governor General of South Africa, joined the PAC and served as its representative in Algeria. He was expelled from the party for congratulating his protege, League

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Jonathan, on his election victory. The PAC could not afford BCP displeasure, which was the reason for the expulsion.

The ideological struggle continued within the PAC. Leballo adhered to the Maoist line, which emphasised mass mobilisation in the revolutionary development of national independence, socialism and internationalism. This was unacceptable to the external mission personnel who favoured reformism and reliance on external powers. Burgess summarised the attitude of the latter:

Many of the dissidents were intellectually inclined individuals who had played a

significant role in founding the PAC and who aspired to higher class positions. An attitude persisted among the dissidents which was resentful of the leadership roles given to those who were from less-educated and lower class backgrounds; this partly explains the antagonism of PAC dissidents to P. K. Leballo. 18

Leballo, the orator and activist, found it extremely difficult to deal with

elitist colleagues in exile for he was no longer able to appeal to party membership directly. In August 1966 a paper supporting a reformist solution to South Africa was presented by Raboroko, A. B. Ncgobo, and Selby Mvusi at a UN conference in Brazil. This they falsely attributed to Leballo. In October Leballo dissociated the party from this stance. Raboroko and Ncgobo were suspended but received support from Nyaose, Molotsi, and Mahomo, all of whom called for an open convention to have their views adopted as official policy, reasoning that in exile they had the numbers to oppose Leballo. In July 1967 Ncgobo and Raboroko launched an unsuccessful coup. Tanzanian intervention enabled the party to meet in Moshi in September where Leballo at last pushed through acceptance of the Maoist line with his twenty-two page document PAC's Revolutionary Message to the Nation. Ncgobo was suspended as treasurer and replaced by David Sibeko.

The Revolutionary Message was an attempt to put forward a clearly stated plan of the PAC's future strategy. It strongly condemned elitism and attempts to reform South Africa with international help. It intended to transform the external PAC from a political party into a politicised military force which would launch a people's war and administer territory as it expanded from bases in the remoter areas of South Africa. The Azanian People's Liberation Army, the equivalent of Mao's Red Army, would have a sense of service and not be associated with atrocities as in the days of Poqo. Leballo also drew heavily from the example of Vietnam.

Not only did the external office personnel baulk at the plan to enlist them into a purely military organisation, but Raboroko, Nyaose, Mahomo and 'Molotsi all thought Ncgobo had been victimised unfairly. At the end of the year dissent broke out in the Lusaka office, to where the PAC had moved its headquarters to direct the guerrilla infiltration south. Letlaka and Molete were not only opposed to the infiltration but had misappropriated funds sent to finance it. In April 1968 they denounced Leballo and the new revolutionary command and appealed to the Zambian government for assistance. The Zambians, already alarmed by the consequences of backing ANC and PAC attacks respectively through Rhodesia and Mozambique, closed the PAC camp at Senkobo and detained Leballo for a month. The PAC withdrew to Tanzania and set up a joint training camp with the Zimbabweans at Chunya near Mbeya. This gave heart to the reformist wing which increased its efforts to denounce

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Leballo and the power given to younger less educated members willing to fight. At length the Tanzanians intervened and an OAU commission of enquiry was convened in November 1968 which recommended the expulsion from the party of Ncgobo, Letlaka, Molete, Mahomo, 'Molotsi, Raboroko, and Nyaose. This was carried out but Leballo's new line and personal position were undermined by Nyerere's 1969 Lusaka Manifesto, which recommended outside intervention and a negotiated settlement in South Africa, and Leballo's involvement with Tanzanian dissidents who tried unsuccessfully to recruit him for a plot to overthrow Nyerere. Leballo informed the authorities of the plot and most of the ring-leaders were arrested. However, the Tanzanians felt he had delayed informing them for too long, as if he was weighing his options. Thereafter, the liberation movements were no longer permitted easy access to armouries and their movements were more closely monitored.

Leballo still hoped that a BCP election victory in Lesotho would enable the PAC to operate more effectively but the British-mercenary backed coup of January 1970, following the BCP election victory, imprisoned the BCP leadership for three years and prevented them from taking office for a further twenty. Leballo was the only African leader who spoke out against the BNP regime at the OAU conference that year in Addis Ababa, where David Sibeko made a determined effort to strangle the BNP leader, Leabua Jonathan Molapo, as he made his way to the auditorium. Leballo's offer to train BCP supporters as APLA troops was rejected by the acting BCP secretary-general, Godfrey Kolisang, whom Leballo had tormented as a White man's stooge at Lovedale.'9

In 1974 the recently released BCP leadership launched an abortive coup. In those places such as Mapoteng where members of the NEC personally led the insurgents, there were instances of astonishing heroism, but vital players absconded or turned themselves in. In addition, the BCP had no telephone or radio communication, and when they captured weapons, they had little or no knowledge of how to use them. The paramilitary crushed the rising with considerable brutality but many of the NEC managed to escape, including Mokhehle, Koenyama Chakela (secretary-general), Gauda Khausu (chairman), Ntsukunyane Mphanya (assistant secretary-general) who had captured Mapoteng with the only bullet his forces possessed, and Matooane Mapefane (administrative secretary), a talented soccer player who had smuggled Philip Kgosana out of South Africa. By 1974 both ANC and PAC had acute recruitment problems. The ANC had been successful in dominating overseas publicity during the PAC's debilitating leadership quarrels but, like the PAC, was unable to attract volunteers easily from South Africa. Both PAC and ANC offered to train the Basotho in order to bolster their own flagging military program. There were reservations within the PAC about the problems of training BCP either separately or as part of a mixed force. The BCP was not noted for its ideology, and, although sympathetic to the PAC, it had a parliamentary background and no reason to adopt the austere highly disciplined role Leballo envisaged for it. Nevertheless the BCP accepted the offer to train as APLA, masquerade as members of the PAC and only become Lesotho Liberation Army personnel (LLA) when they returned to Lesotho.

Mphanya was the original choice for LLA commander, but withdrew because of ill health. He was replaced by Khasu, the BCP party chairman who had twice defeated Leabua Jonathan in national elections and had seen action in 1974. Of the 187 Basotho who were eventually recruited for the LLA

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venture, most were 'Russians', elderly anarchistic migrant miners from the Rand, recruited by the Mokhehle brothers to ensure they would not pose a threat to the BCP leadership. Younger, better-educated recruits were assembled by Nowhere Liau, a colourful entrepreneur in Botswana but only about 50 of the force were under the age of fifty. All were sent in groups from July 1974 onwards to Libya where the trainers did no screening and set about training the nominated commander and his army together. The result was chaos. The Basotho had not been briefed and many were frightened by the 'half-caste' Libyans and the strange surroundings. Khasu's style of leadership was to threaten poor performers with death and this so unnerved one miner that he knifed Khasu on the third day of training. Khasu took two months to recover and his place was effectively filled by Mapefane, who not only learned quickly but also knew Arabic and used his knowledge firstly to interpret and then instruct for the Libyans. By April 1975 the first group of recruits had mastered basic skills and Khasu demanded to return to fight. He was opposed by a group of five younger members of the LLA, in particular by Mapefane and Mafela, a Soviet trained physicist whom Leballo had marked as a future commander. The younger group's point was that it was absurd to believe they would cross into Lesotho, engage the BNP regime and remain unmolested by Pretoria. They told Khasu they needed further training as they would inevitably become involved in the South African conflict. The row continued and was terminated by the arrival of Leballo who gave Khasu a dressing down in front of the whole force about the duties of a soldier. Training continued but at Leballo's departure the quarrel resumed and when Mokhehle himself sent instructions for them to keep training, Khasu refused and left the country. More recruits arrived including a contingent of twenty-six from the South African Students Organisation and the first group moved to Uganda for explosives training. Leballo was called in to deal with another incident. Khasu had chosen an 'elite', who were already given ranks, from a new group of recruits. The elite were allowed to beat the others. Leballo restored order and then, at the request of the Libyan military and the agreement of Ntantala, the APLA commander, appointed Mapefane as PAC military attaché in the Middle East to instruct future recruits, including the next batch of BCP, who numbered one hundred and twenty.

Leballo now attempted to bring closer links between the PAC and BCP declaring that “the reality for the true liberation of Lesotho should be linked with the total liberation of Azania.” Ntantala wanted to use the BCP's superior organisational structure in the Transvaal and Welkom to raise funds and recruit guerrillas but there was also a fear that a successful I.I,A attack in Lesotho would undermine public confidence diplomat-reformist' PAC external mission personnel were considerably less enthusiastic. Three meetings took place between the leaders of both parties in Dar es Salaam but were wrecked by the pompous behaviour of a BCP supporter, Dr Tsiu Selatile, the only African member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who could have applied his knowledge of the Comintern's workings, but chose to treat Ntantala, a pragmatist, as an uncultured ignoramus

“who failed to define the quintessence of Panafricanism in general and the 1949

Programme of Action in particular ... (when considering) ... a merger between the two parties of a united front (which) merited not general but specific connetization in relation to logical premises.”20

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In August 1976 the LLA assembled at Chunya camp, Tanzania, but by then the situation had changed dramatically. With the student unrest in South Africa, the ANC and PAC were swamped with new recruits. Despite the success of the joint PAC-BCP training venture, the external PAC representatives were not competent to deal with the influx of their own supporters sent north by Zephaniah Mothopeng. Five hundred were inducted but many more turned to the ANC in frustration.

In 1975 Ntantala had restored PAC credibility and shocked the ANC/SACP at the Maputo session of the OAU liberation committee by listing the numbers of recruits sent north for training. ANC enquiries revealed the true identity of these APLA soldiers and an attempt was made in December 1976, when the ANC allied itself to the BCP secretary-general, Chakela, to overthrow Mokhehle and bring the LLA into the ANC fold. The coup failed but steps were then taken to upstage Leballo and marginalise Mokhehle by dispatching Chakela to Lesotho for reconciliation talks to create an alliance between the BNP regime and the ANC/SACP. Not only were the ANC now anxious to destroy the LLA, but Ntantala himself changed his position after the recruitment of the new APLA, deciding that continued support for the LLA was no longer in the party's interest. He was also justifiably suspicious of the intentions of younger members of the BCP particularly Selatile and Mapefane, who were already acting independently of the BCP NEC, and, in Selatile's case, feeling he was Mokhehle's chosen successor as the party's chief intellectual.

The PAC camp at Chunya was at first organised by the LLA, until larger numbers of APLA arrived from Libya. Ntantala was camp commander but after 1976 he was challenged by the new recruits. His pre-1976 force was about seventy in number and had used donated clothing and other funds to attract local women and establish families around the camp. Other leaders, particularly Sibeko and Make, were alcoholics. The young recruits objected to the influence and power of this older group, who had lost the will to fight, but were determined to maintain their dominance. Disturbances broke out and Leballo was called in February 1977 to restore order. His austerity, teetotalism and willingness to train with his troops gave him more respect than other leaders. Ntantala, feeling his position deteriorating, unsuccessfully attempted to get the support of Sibeko, now the powerful representative at the United Nations in New York, for a coup against Leballo. The external representatives were still a powerful force-Gqobose, Sibeko's successor as treasurer, alone controlled more than 40 percent of the PAC budget while Ntantala had access to Marxist-Leninist party donations from Scandinavia and West Germany, and Sibeko siphoned off a donation from the Nigerian army of $250,000. Little or none of this was filtering down to the new APLA force. In November 1977 Ntantala launched an attack on the PAC headquarters in Dar es Salaam to capture Leballo and occupy the offices. Even though the target was over 800 km from Chunya, Mapefane's telephone alert to Mafela, the new camp commander then in Dar es Salaam, came barely before Ntantala's troops swept into the city. Mafela defended the party offices with Soweto students and Leballo was not at home. The Tanzanians confined the two groups but the story spread that the LLA was Leballo's personal guard and was controlling the PAC. Selatile was boasting that the LLA had 'put the PAC leadership on the throne', a reference to the new APLA

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high command that replaced that of Ntantala. This writer, reporting to Leballo and Mokhehle in Dar es Salaam in September 1977 on the feasibility of an attack on military headquarters in Maseru, was seriously disturbed by Selatile's meddling, in particular a request to spy on Mphanya, the acting BCP secretary-general, and wrote to Mokhehle to 'exercise your leadership in this matter', a suggestion the BCP leader ignored.

The new APLA command was chosen from the new recruits and in December 1977 the PAC leadership met to discuss preparations for a constitutional conference for the coming year, aware that Sobukwe was dying of cancer. Ntantala still had support and when the new APLA demanded punishment, six of his supporters in the central committee walked out. Sobukwe died on 26 February and Ntantala increased agitation to oppose Leballo taking over as leader. He was supported by Gqobose, who continued to gather funds. The Swazis called in Leballo to deal with Ntantala's attempt to establish himself as a local warlord. Leballo and Sibeko dealt with the problem but the Swazis then introduced legislation to curb both ANC and PAC activities.

By the time the PAC met between 28 June and 4 July 1978 in Arusha for their most important conference since 1959, Leballo's position had been weakened by his association with the LLA. He could rely on the young APLA but was under enormous pressure from the ‘diplomat-reformist’ group that now had American foreign policy to support them. The Carter administration had determined that it needed South Africa as a stable element in the equation to settle the Zimbabwe war. In this the Americans were supported by the Tanzanians and other 'front line states', who advised the ANC and PAC to tone down their militancy towards South Africa and adopt a policy of detente and dialogue. Leballo refused, unwilling to see an American solution to southern Africa, and earned the displeasure of Nyerere. His position had been further weakened by the death of Mao Zedong and the consequent switch from revolutionary fervour to American appeasement by the new Chinese leadership. The ANC/SACP success in its drive to be recognised as the 'authentic' liberation movement had closed many avenues-in particular Mozambique and Vietnam-to the PAC, which was obliged to consider extremely unsavoury venues for training such as Amin's Uganda, Qaddafi's Libya, and Pol Pot's Kampuchea, and this had damaged the party's international standing. Sibeko dominated the Arusha conference, using his funds to secure a central committee supportive of his reformist attitude and largely overcoming the young APLA's challenge for power. He was not strong enough to oust Leballo but managed to deny him the post of president, ostensibly in respect to the late Sobukwe, backing him for the new position of chairman of the party. Leballo unsuccessfully opposed Ntantala's expulsion from the party, pointing out that however corrupt he may have been, he had used it to create a power base rather than squander funds and had established networks of infiltration into South Africa. Along with Ntantala, the conference expelled Gqobose and a hundred and one others, most of whom were Ntantala's old APLA. The new APLA high command was confirmed and, against Leballo's wishes, all funds were terminated to the LLA in Chunya.

Mokhehle wrote to this writer after the conference,

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“(Leballo) has come out victorious but weak and nervous to assist us any further” and appealed for financial assistance to transport the 178 LLA troops south.21

This writer sent a large Bedford van, which the over confident Selatile failed to clear from Tanzanian customs, and then £5500, which enabled the LLA to leave for Botswana by plane and rail. This convinced the Basotho on the Rand that the venture was serious enough to back with fund raising. Guerrilla warfare broke out in Lesotho on 15 March 1979.

Although the LLA had left, Leballo now found his movements restricted. Uganda was closed to him since his quarrel with Amin's henchmen over molestation of PAC girls. In October 1978 APLA's weapons were commandeered by the Tanzanian People's Defence Force (TPDF) for the war in Uganda. Nyerere requested PAC condemnation of Uganda, but Leballo refused, suspecting the war was a means to reinstate Obote in power. This refusal infuriated the Tanzanians who looked more favourably towards Sibeko as a possible replacement as PAC leader, an idea which he was finding increasingly appealing. Leballo had the support of the army, Sibeko of the funds. Burgess wrote:

Affluence and international contacts no longer satisfied the diplomatic group;

it moved to consolidate control over the PAC in the face of the rising threat posed by APLA.22

APLA, on its part, was incensed by 'the stories about lavish

parties, corruption and contacts with politically suspect figures (Andrew Young)23 which surrounded Sibeko. In late 1978 a commission of enquiry, controlled by Sibeko, recommended a slowing down of APLA infiltration south and Tanzanian troops increased patrols around Chunya and removed APLA's weapons. In February 1979 a lively party of PAC bon viveurs in Dar es Salaam was gate crashed by forty APLA soldiers who beat the revellers badly. The Tanzanians demanded to have the culprits handed over and were angered by Leballo's claim that they had left for the south. On 21 March twenty young PAC members who had refused military training took Leballo hostage, believing Henry Isaacs' story that he had been responsible for preventing them taking up West German scholarships. Four members of an APLA rescue mission were killed in a car accident and when Leballo was eventually released, his demand for his captors to be shot was not implemented. It was becoming obvious that he was no longer welcome in Tanzania and since he needed medical treatment, the central committee decided to let him go to Britain and to fill his place as chairman temporarily with a presidential council of three members. As soon as he had left, it was announced he had resigned for health reasons. Sibeko, Make and Ntloedibe formed the coup leadership.

The APLA troops opposed the coup on the grounds that the coup leaders were corrupt, rather than unconstitutional, and refused to obey orders from anyone but Leballo. Funds and money were terminated to the camp but the finance officer, who supported APLA, allowed himself to waylaid and robbed in Dar es Salaam after visiting the bank. Justin Nkonyane, the new APLA

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commander, was arrested and detained for a day. Sibeko was recalled from New York and held two stormy meetings with the APLA leaders, who demanded more power and funds. That evening, after drinking heavily and issuing threats concerning Leballo, Sibeko was shot dead by APLA when trying to throw them out of his flat. The Tanzanians arrested eighteen members of the APLA high command, held twelve of them until May 1980, and put the rest on trial for murder. APLA was confined to Chunya where they were joined by twenty more trained in Kampuchea. Enoch Zulu, who had six weeks military training in Egypt, was appointed APLA commander and on 11 March 1980 APLA was informed by a Tanzanian army officer that Make was the new PAC leader. There was an immediate outcry and the Tanzanians opened fire, killing eleven and wounding forty. The remainder were split up and confined to camps in other parts of the country.24

In April, ten days after Zimbabwean independence, this writer arrived in Harare and established a new headquarters for Leballo, who remained there until 21 April 1981 gathering together remnants of APLA and negotiating with ZANU(PF), North Korea and Libya for assistance. In addition he met with Mapefane, who had been stripped of his LLA command by Mokhehle and was seeking arms in Zimbabwe. Frustrated LLA troops, alerted to his presence in Zimbabwe, began requesting him for assistance, since Mokhehle had disappeared.25

At the end of the year John Pokela replaced Make as leader of the Tanzanian-backed PAC and Leballo wrote to him suggesting a meeting to resolve affairs. Pokela did not reply and was then physically attacked by APLA troops, an incident the Tanzanians blamed on Leballo. Pokela merely gestured to Leballo when they encountered each other as official guests at Rufaro stadium in Harare on 18 April. On 20 April 1981 under pressure from Tanzania, Leballo was arrested while waiting for a scheduled appointment with Edison Zvobgo, minister of local government, held overnight and deported the next day. He managed to reach Libya starving and penniless after being shunted round the Middle East.26 His supporters were arrested and either deported or kept in Chikurubi maximum security prison without charges until a BBC broadcast by this writer from London secured their release. As Lodge said 'the lack of dependable and generous patrons compelled the PAC to choose weak and unreliable allies'. ...'27 Leballo left Libya after further Tanzanian pressure and went to Ghana, where Jerry Rawlings used him for work in the people's committees but was unable to feed him or pay him an allowance. 28 In an act of considerable courage he used his remaining safe diplomatic passport, from Liberia (his others were Tanzanian and Ugandan), to fly to Rwanda and Nairobi where he met Nkonyane and others who had escaped from restriction in Tanzania. He linked up with Museveni's Ugandan resistance movement but the arms supplied to him by Libya through Rwanda for APLA were taken by the Ugandans themselves.

Leballo eventually settled in London, living a life of extreme poverty, dispatching what little money he had to his distressed APLA troops while he lived off bread and tea, even giving up his famous pipe. His attempts to link up with the LLA were rebuffed by the BCP, who had allied themselves with Pretoria. Although his final years were plagued by acute lacks of funds, he did manage to reunite the surviving members of the 1959 NEC,29 and in a lengthy and complex plot finally tricked General Justin Lekhanya into

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breaking with the BNP regime and bringing back the exiled BCP. The tension he endured, as the final stages unravelled and the South Africans took unforeseen measures against the BNP, combined with influenza and high blood pressure and he died suddenly twelve days before Lekhanya seized power, using parts of the speech Leballo had sent him a year earlier. Lesotho never became a significant player in the South African struggle as Leballo had hoped, and was therefore ill-placed to deal with the question of the lost lands that had dominated his childhood and shaped his political outlook."'

John Pokela's term as Tanzanian-appointed PAC leader was marked by timidity, continued mutinies, defections to the ANC, and further disintegration. Henry Isaacs, whose ingenuity seriously embarrassed Leballo, resigned from his lucrative post at the UN as Sibeko's successor, denouncing Pokela's leadership for corruption, mismanagement, and factionalism. Benedict Sondlo, accused of grave corruption by APLA, was murdered by them in Dar es Salaam and further unrest in the camps was curbed by Tanzanian forces. Many APLA soldiers escaped to Kenya where their position remained precarious." L. J. Selepe, who survived Chunya and then left the PAC in 1985 in frustration with Pokela's inability to launch a guerrilla struggle, wrote,

These problems resulted to a collective decision to eliminate all who stood in our way,

to go back and fight the racist regime. 32 Selepe joined the ANC and eventually became a member of the South

African Air Force. Ntantala was sacked as PAC representative in Zimbabwe and over a hundred PAC members left the party, some joining the ANC. Pokela died suddenly in Harare in June 1985 and was replaced by Johnson Mlambo, whose only qualifications were that he had been well liked in jail and hadn't indulged in faction fighting. Guerrilla activity resumed, mostly directed against the security forces, but 1986 and 1987 saw fierce criticism of the leadership, including accusations of criminal activity, including drug smuggling. Moreover, the PAC leadership was unable to establish an identity markedly different from the ANC. They were elitist and wanted reform, paying lip-service to Izwe Lethu. They were not identified as being the champions of the wretched and the APLA slogan of One settler, one bullet was a mockery of the Maoist tradition and was unsupported by even the most rudimentary elements of other policies. While Leballo's University of Azania (his answer to Mao's Yan’an Red Army University) had been planned for Zimbabwe," the new PAC training centre was sited in Sudan, ruled by a deeply despised regime; and Gora Ebrahim, a leading external representative, financed the party with donations from Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The brief leadership of Mothopeng, who had aided Mokhehle in the launch of the BCP and had been jailed for effective recruiting work for APLA, was not enough to halt the PAC's deteriorating situation. In addition, the defection of Ntsu Mokhehle to Pretoria and his apparently deliberate mismanagement of the LLA ended hopes of establishing a significant APLA presence in Lesotho and bringing the Basotho into a people's war. The nature of the party was also changing, gaining support among the Cape Coloured community and disaffected Muslim youth, perhaps giving that non-materialist dedication to the struggle unsuccessfully sought by Lembede and Leballo. While the vigorous campaigning of the new vice-president Patricia De Lille gave some

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hope of returning the PAC to its traditional role of speaking for the most oppressed strata of society, the vacillating conduct of Clarence Makwetu and his inexperienced or discredited colleagues in the PAC NEC recalled the earlier years when PAC leaders wished they had been bright enough to be lawyers or doctors and lead the ANC. Despite De Lille and other activists, the PAC was an almost irrelevant factor in the lead up to the 1994 elections, in which the party was humiliated, gaining a derisory 1.2 percent of the vote. The Cape PAC membership confessed that they were unable to vote for their own leadership and preferred to support the ANC in an attempt to prevent the NP from taking office. Moreover, the party was badly split over the issue of taking part in the election, and a young militant group named the PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs emerged opposing participation which they saw as a means of creating a new multi-racial elite enjoying a first world life style at the expense of a vast derelict third world underclass. Joseph Mbatha, a Year 10 student in 1994 and a chairman of the Pan Africanist Student Organisation (PASO) as well as an Azanian National Youth Unity (AZANYU) member, described the younger generation's attitude to the Makwetu leadership's attitude to elections:

There was PAC Congress in 1993 at Umtata in eastern Cape. ... It was there where the

PAC started declining. The PASO, AZANYU and other members of PAC distanced themselves for elections. I want to state this, there was split already in PAC because we distanced ourselves as a Youth of Azania from the talks with the settlers regime. We called ourselves as Revolutionary Watchdogs under the banner of PAC. ... When there was time to vote for the PAC to participate in talks with the regime. The Congress became in disorder. The Youth of PAC ran out of the Congress. We unite ourselves outside the Congress against the captured leadership.34

Mbatha summarised the attitude of the PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs to

the Mandela election victory: The ruling class has only adjusted by co-opting some of the oppressed. The genuine

aspirations of the African are not addressed. It is significant that while American commentators on the PAC, such as

Gerhart, Burgess and Gibson (the last two of whom were his colleagues and friends), have interpreted Leballo's career in context as the representative of a new class emerging to challenge the established antiapartheid leadership, White South African and British writers, such as Lodge and Bolnick (neither of whom knew him) have been critical of Leballo's career to a near pathological degree. These writers as well as rivals and sympathisers from South Africa who knew Leballo, such as Halpern and Pogrund, never came to terms with the class aspect of the PAC, and their perspective was obscured by the mental restraints of their own background.

To Americans, leadership is extremely democratic and it matters little

where a person comes from, whereas in class and status obsessed British, White South African and African professional circles, it is a matter of supreme importance. Here for instance is Lodge's criteria for leadership:

He (Pokela) had strong credentials; he had taught with Robert Sobukwe and had played

a key role in the Poqo revolt 35

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While Pokela's 'key role' is questionable, since he was implicated in faction murders which undermined operations,36 Lodge's analysis betrays the general liberal White conception of what constitutes African leadership. The accepted path for African leadership was through university education, trade unionism, the chieftaincy or conventional military training. Leballo's chieftainship seems never to be have been known by previous writers on the PAC and it was not a path he ever considered for leadership, unlike other minor, but overwhelmingly Catholic, Basotho chiefs who formed the government and military hierarchy of independent Lesotho. In South Africa, minor chieftaincy was associated with undemocratic rural conservatives, usually acting as agents for the White government. Leballo's drive to take a prominent place in the African political leadership of South Africa violated political traditions. The ANC originally subscribed to the liberal Christian Black Englishmen ideal, one that was upheld by leaders such as Lutuli and Tambo. Mahatma Gandhi's involvement in South African politics and his successful drive for Indian independence was also influential and complemented the Christian ethic of non-violent protest. The ANC leader Lutuli even adopted Indian Congress Party dress as the party's official uniform. From the 1950s onwards, when the South African Communist Party (SACP) played an increasing role in the party, the ANC leadership identified with the Leninist concept of a hard core of professional revolutionaries directing the masses without being answerable to them. All paths envisaged highly educated leaders forsaking relative comfort, prosperity and social status to take up the cause of the oppressed. Leballo himself never reached this status. After the Second World War he qualified as a primary school teacher but was dismissed from the teaching service for using violence during a political demonstration. Whatever his character, he was not the sort of political leader associated with high office. He himself recognised this problem and was willing to serve under 'acceptable' leaders who knew how to use his undeniably enormous talents. Leballo deeply respected Mda and Sobukwe, even when the former abandoned him in the 1970s, and told this writer in 1981 he was prepared to surrender the leadership to Pokela if he could continue as APLA commander.

Commentators on the PAC single out Sobukwe as an inspirational leader but it was Leballo, as Mokhehle testified, who created the PAC. Rivals modelled themselves on Sobukwe, eager to emerge as the intellectual leader acceptable in elite circles, but the PAC membership, like the BCP's, was drawn more from the ‘probably never will have’s’ than the ‘not have enoughs’ of the ANC and were willing to fight for a more equitable society than the elitists and reformists. John Nyati Pokela was the sort of PAC leader acceptable to the foreign mission personnel, the international community, the press and the PAC elite to whom restoring good relations with Zambia was considered a notable achievement, but whose political philosophy was a mean-spirited form of mystical fascism with an paternalistic undemocratic attitude to those below them on the socio-economic ladder. Stephen Plaatjie, a lecturer at Vista University and a member of the PAC Vaal Executive, echoed the view in June 1995 that PAC leadership was concomitant with being polite, African and educated:

I don't share your views which suggest that the PAC declined after Potlako K. Leballo's deposition in the late-1970s. All evidence ... strongly indicates the revival of the PAC (was) mainly due to the efforts of Nyati Pokela who was

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revered as a long standing veteran of the PAC and who was perceived to be untainted in the internal struggles. ...38

Hezekiel Mothupi felt that elitism wasn't the only problem that prevented the revival of the PAC as an effective force:

You will agree with me that since the death of PK, PAC has never had any leader of

Leballo's calibre, from 1979 we have had leaders, a collection of all types and kind of criminal element, such as Vus Make and Sibeko, who killed our men at Chunya, then you (had) from 1980. ... drug peddlers and car smugglers under the leadership of Joe Mkwanazi and Johnson Mlambo. None of these people knew the basic policies and programmes of the PAC ... that is why the PAC lost its potential in exile.39

Until the 1979 Sibeko coup and the 1980 Chunya Massacre, it was

certainly not a foregone conclusion that the ANC would emerge as the dominant African political movement in South Africa. The Leballo-Sibeko 1978 PAC leadership combining with the young APLA enabled both leaders to engage in the separate spheres in which they respectively excelled-grass-roots military-political expansion and the diplomatic circuit. But what could have been drove Leballo to deep despair. On September 25, 1985, three and a half months before his death, he wrote to this writer:

I have the most dynamic revolutionary ideas of strategy and tactics of a people's war to

wipe out the foreign illegal occupiers of our fatherland-Azania. ... It is a pity that one day I will die without having fulfilled this ideological goal. ... Sometime if I don't write or reply to your letters on time, please, don't blame me, sometimes I feel terribly a disappointed person.

If Sibeko had restrained his ambition and held on till Zimbabwean

independence, if the ZANLA commander Togongara had lived, if a PAC people's war had operated out of Mozambique for the ten years Slovo wasted in his ineffectual sabotage campaign, if Ntsu Mokhehle had not turned traitor, there would have been a strong challenge to the progress towards the so-called 'miracle' of 1994 the more prosperous sections of South African society are congratulating themselves upon now. The future of PAC is dependent on the ANC-NP-IFP coalition's ability to satisfy electoral expectations and come to terms with powerful forces that feel marginalised and embittered by the accommodation with the NP. The PAC, particularly through De Lille's parliamentary success in criticising the ANC's excesses and maladministration, could ultimately provide a more radical alternative for disaffected voters. On the other hand, the political discontent that the PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs identify as the cause of escalating violent crime could see sections of APLA grow into a variation of Peru's Shining Path movement. The fate of the PAC depends upon whether or not electorally or revolutionary elements of significance share the Watchdogs assertion that the Mandela government is an ideologically bankrupt and ineffectual administration whose compromises have enabled the White population to retain its power and wealth behind negligible changes.

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REFERENCES

1. Burgess, Stephen, draft PhD thesis on the PAC, Leiden University, Netherlands, 1983. Burgess

and his colleague Michael Wilson, both Maoists, gave valuable assistance to the PAC in the 1970s and early-1980s, Burgess accomplished extremely interesting analytical and practical work for the PAC before domestic circumstances intervened. He seemed set to present his thesis in 1983 but apparently did not do so.

2. Patrick Duncan was a colonial officer in Basutoland and a close friend of Chief Leabua Jonathan, helping him launch the Basotho National Party, and giving him newspaper publicity. This writer was Acting BCP representative in Britain and Ireland from 1976-1977 before joining the PAC, and financed many of the BCP leadership in exile until 1981 (including a trip for Mphanya and Qhobela Molapo to lobby the African American caucus in the USA) as well as the transfer of the LLA from Chunya to Botswana. He served on Mokhehle's orders for three months in 1977 as a major in the Lesotho paramilitary.

3. The whole story was published by Bernard Leeman in Sesotho as Lesole la Mokhehle (Soldier for Mokhehle), Roma, 1991. In December 1984 (sic), this writer met Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman. Campbell was told that Leballo had a plan to bring down the BNP of Lesotho by convincing General Lekhanya his career was finished for having been tricked into financing the LLA against himself. Campbell was provided with all details because this writer felt that Leballo had been denigrated for so long that it was time for an independent authority to vouch that a seemingly unbelievable story was in fact true.

4. Mda's Hard Core and Inner Circle groups within the Africanist Movement, respectively numbered about seventeen and fifteen. Mda, Leballo, Sobukwe, John Pokela and Victor Sifora belonged to both groups who later provided seven members of the 1959 Pan Africanist Congress (Hard Core: Sobukwe, Leballo and Fazzie; Inner Circle: Ngendane, Molotsi, Mothopeng and Z. B. Molete) while Ntsu Mokhehle (Hard Core) led the BCP in Lesotho.

5. Joe Matthews worked for the SACP in Lesotho, in the 1960s using its funds against the BCP, a diversion which cost the BCP the 1965 election.

6. Ngubane, Jordan, An African Explains Apartheid, Praeger, New York, 1963, p. 164. 7. Interview with Qhobela Molapo 1978 8. Letter to this writer 23 Nov 1978 10. Interview with Leballo 1983 11. Rand Daily Mail, 7 Aug 1962 12. Die Burger, 22 March 1963 13. Driver, C. J. Patrick Duncan South African and Pan African, Heinemann, London, 1980, p. 224 14. Gordon Winter's Inside BOSS-South Africa's Secret Police, Penguin, 1981, which incurred a

record number of writs for libel. Leballo insisted this writer should buy him a copy but, on reading the first reference to himself, tossed it aside in contempt

15. P. K. Leballo correspondence with the British Home Office 1983-84 London. Leballo argued that by taking away his British passport he had been rendered stateless, which was not permitted under British nationality law.

16. Pogrond, Benjamin, Sobukwe and Apartheid, Rutgers University Press, 1991, p. 20 17. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC 18. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC 19. Interview with Leballo 1983. Kolisang denounced this writer in 1970 as a South African

Army Officer when approached with an offer of help. 20. Selatile letter to this writer 26 Aug 1980 21. Ntsu Mokhehle letter to this writer 20 July 1978 22. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC. 23. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC. 24. Forty-one letters to this writer from members of APLA in Kenya organizing the escape of

personnel from restriction in Tanzania 1984-1987 25. The BCP in Gaborone denounced Mapefane to the Zimbabwe police to prevent him re-entering

the country to search for an independent supply of arms for the LLA, and thus circumvent the 'commercialisation of the revolution' as he put it by the Mokhehle brothers, whose mismanagement of the war included the maintenance of mistresses, heavy gambling in the casino at Gaborone and the betrayal of critics to the South African Police. This writer, while serving as a major in the Lesotho military on Ntsu Mokhehle's orders, was shown letters and photographs by General Lekhanya sent by Shakhane Mokhehle, the BCP treasurer and now

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a minister in the BCP government, reporting on the LLA. Mokhehle did nothing against his brother when this matter was revealed. Shakhane's work against the LLA for Lekhanya and the South African police not only led to the arrest of most of the LLA high command a[ Welkom but considerably undermined the BCP's bargaining power with Lekhanya after they returned to Lesotho.

26. Letter from Leballo to this writer 26 Apr 1981 from Tripoli, Libya. 27. Lodge, Tom in Ian Liebenberg, Fiona Lortan, Bobby Nel, Gert van der Westhuizen (eds),

The Long March: The Story of the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa, Haum, Pretoria, 1994, p. 121

28. Letters from Leballo 28 Dec 1982, 17 Mar 1983, from Accra, Ghana. 29. Letter from Leballo 16 Apr 1984 and information from A. B. Ncgobo 1984 30. Leeman, Lesole la Mokhehle (Soldier for Mokhehle), 1991. Campbell asked if he could write

an article on the true causes of the end of the BNP regime, but this writer declined, quoting Richard Gibson's comment that it was too complex for outsiders to understand and too frightening for those who did. Moreover, the world press equated the coup with South African pressure, although the coup administration contained the Lesotho Communist Party leader, Dr Sefali Malefane. Leballo's body was flown back to South Africa and then taken by road to Lifelakoaneng for burial. Lekhanya prohibited any political demonstrations.

31. Letters to this writer 1984 - 1987 32. Letter to this writer 22 June 1995 33. University of Azania proposal to the Libyan Government, Harare, 1981. The Libyans were

prepared to launch the venture with an initial US$1.8 million, but this was interpreted as a threat to the business interests of the Zimbabwe education minister, Dr Mutumbuka, whose Zimbabwe Distance Education College had just been formed. Mutumbuka clashed with ZANU(PF) secretary-general, Edgar Tekere, over the issue, which was shelved after Leballo was expelled from Zimbabwe

34. Letter to this writer 15 June 1995 35. Lodge, Tom in The Long March: the story of the struggle for liberation in South Africa, 1994,

p. 121. Bolnick, Joel, 'Potlako Leballo-the Man Who Hurried to Meet his Destiny', Journal of Modern African Studies, 29(3) 1991, pp. 413-442. Halpem, Jack, South Africa's Hostages: Ba.sutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, Penguin, London, 1966, p. 27. Gerhart, Gail, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an ideology, University of California Press, 1978, p. 252. Barrell, Howard in Johnson, Shaun (ed.), South Africa: No Turning Back, Macmillan, England, 1988, p 73.

Bolnick's Euro centred pseudo-psychological study of Leballo felt he 'constantly betrayed the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the staggering human frailty of the modern leader' and speaks of Leballo's 'psychopathy' which he equates with 'tell-tell signs of toquaciousness and the psychic swagger.' Leaving aside Bolnick's judgment that politicians who talk a lot and have an arrogant manner are mentally ill, other commentators on the PAC strongly condemned Leballo. Halpern wrote of Leballo's 'personal instability', his love of 'exaggerated claims', and Gerhart of his role as a 'poor substitute for Sobukwe' as leader (p. 252). Lodge described Leballo ,as pretty disastrous for the PAC and its followers' (letter to this writer 21 May 1995), while Barrell ignored Leballo's crucial intervention in establishing discipline in the joint APLA-LLA force in Libya, describing his military work as 'rhetorical' and a 'posture' (p. 73). Even Pogrund, a sympathetic observer, stated:

I always had difficulty in understanding him (Leballo): words came out of him as a series of explosions of sound and much of it was rambling and disconnected. An anti-white racism often seemed to be lurking just under the surface, on occasion breaking into actual words (p. 67).

Leballo indubitably invented stories about his past but the extent has been widely exaggerated. This writer, who worked closely with him for six years, initially found that Leballo did it as a kind of smoke-screen because he believed that anyone knowing the truth would use it as a weapon against him. Leballo's close friends and his own sons understood this trait and agreed that it did not interfere with important work, but were aware that it could be wrongly interpreted as some extreme form of psychosis. As this writer told Tom Lodge: “P. K. Leballo was an extraordinary person from a horrendous society. In some ways you were fortunate not to have endured what that society endured but as a result it has clouded your work and I do not think you will ever be capable of understanding the effects on a people from a derelict enslaved society of years of constant extreme stress. P. K. Leballo's life cannot be

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discussed fully by those who knew him best because he remainc a symbol that many academics and politicians wish to destroy. If a fault is found it is identified as a major psychological failing. I haven't read a balanced account of P. K. Leballo. He is too emotive an issue. Bolnick's article sets the perverted White settler world as the standard and then sees how Leballo measures up to it.” (Letter 2 Sep 1995). (This writer acknowledges he has difficulty dealing with academics of his generation who chose to work under the apartheid regime in preference to joining the guerrilla struggle).

36. Pokela was implicated in faction murders in Maseru after Leballo's departure. On his arrival on Robben Island, the PAC branch resigned in protest, except for Dipheko 'China' Chiloana, who did not know the story

37. This writer typed Leballo's letter to Pokela, suggesting a meeting. The letter did not make the offer of stepping down in turn for command of APLA

38. Letter to this writer June 1995 39. Letter to this writer 8 July 1995