In the early 1980s the Lesotho Liberation Army (LLA), the military wing of the exiled Basutoland Congress Party (BCP), waged an armed struggle against the then authoritarian Lesotho state. However, the LLA was mainly perceived as being a proxy force for the South African apartheid regime's attempts to destabilise frontline states as a component of its 'Total Strategy'. This dominant, prescriptive narrative has limited further understandings of the LLA. This article moves beyond these perceptions to demonstrate that the LLA was more than a proxy force. The LLA's activities seemed to defy easy categorisation as they existed in the nebulous space between the 'un-national' and the transnational. However, LLA fighters were motivated to pursue a course of retribution for the wrongs they experienced from state violence. The LLA was able to pressure the ruling regime, even though it was an internal military coup in 1986 which finally overturned the government. The subsequent shift in relations between Lesotho and South Africa made the exiled BCP's position untenable and negotiations for their return commenced. However, internal schisms within the LLA led one faction within the Transkei to pursue their own path home by attempting a failed bus hijacking during Pope John Paul II's visit to Maseru in 1988. The BCP's weak negotiating position led to the LLA being de-militarised but not merged into the Lesotho army. This turn of events and the difficult reintegration of LLA fighters into society has contributed to the overall instability and violence that has characterised Lesotho ever since.
Existing scholarship on the foundation of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as an anti-colonial movement has largely adhered to one of two interpretations of Angolan nationalism: one emphasising ethnicity and the other highlighting elite rivalries. The party's narrative centres on the Muangai meeting in the Angolan bush on 13 March 1966 as its formal founding act. We argue that these interpretations are overly simplistic - either by reducing UNITA's origins to an ethnic framework or by portraying its formation in 1966 as an isolated event, disconnected from earlier negotiations and political efforts. This article examines the process that led to the formal establishment of UNITA as an anti-colonial movement by identifying networks, actors, alliances and motivations that contributed to its formation between 1964 and 1966, including a little-known period of co-operation between Jonas Savimbi and his later enemy, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). This is achieved through a multi-source approach that integrates extensive archival materials with narratives from founding members of the movement, including memoirs and interviews, which favours the critical examination of conflicting viewpoints. By focusing on the emergence of UNITA, this article helps to shed light on the complex fragmentation of early Angolan nationalism and its inability to form a functioning united front against colonialism.
This article examines the social impacts of two major extractivist infrastructure mega-projects in Mozambique: Vale's coal mining operations in Tete province and TotalEnergies' LNG project in Cabo Delgado. Promoted by the Mozambican government and multinational corporations as catalysts of development and economic growth, these projects have instead deepened inequalities, leading to widespread dispossession and impoverishment of affected local communities. The article critically examines infrastructure development and applies the concept of 'infrastructural harm' to show how these projects create and reproduce systemic marginalisation. It introduces an innovative analytical framework of counter-infrastructure resistance, mapping how communities politicise their grievances and develop adaptive resistance strategies along a politicisation continuum. Drawing on a qualitative comparative analysis of the two case studies, the article traces the evolution of resistance across the different project phases - pre-construction, construction and operation. Findings reveal that while communities in Tete were silenced amid increased insecurity, resistance in Cabo Delgado escalated earlier and in more organised forms, feeding into wider regional unrest. By connecting the dynamics of infrastructural harm, politicisation and resistance, the article challenges the dominant development-through-extractivism paradigm and argues for approaches that centre on social justice and environmental sustainability in Mozambique and across the global south.
Constitutional design plays a major role in the accommodation of diversity in plural and divided societies. This article examines the measures taken to accommodate diversity in the Independence Constitution of Mauritius and discusses their implications towards nation-building in postcolonial Mauritius. Mauritius has a plural society composed of the descendants of migrants and the population is divided along ethnic, linguistic, religious, caste and class lines. During the decolonisation process, the main challenge was to balance identity with political interest in order to avoid conflict. The Independence Constitution crafted by the British was the result of negotiations between different political, ethnic and religious groups, with the main point of contention being identity and representation in independent Mauritius. Yet, postcolonial Mauritius became one of Africa's success stories in terms of sustained democracy, political stability and economic growth. The article argues that while the measures taken to accommodate the diversity of the Mauritian population into the Constitution have contributed to state-building, they have frozen identities in a changing society and thereby not promoted nation-building in the postcolonial era.
This article examines the growth and evolution of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in South West Africa between 1921 and 1924. While historians have focused on the role that millenarianism, black nationalism and American intervention played in the growth and evolution of the UNIA among non-indigenous black people in South West Africa's industrial centres, this study instead examines why the UNIA took root among indigenous Namibians in the early 1920s and what factors, outside American intervention, facilitated the UNIA's growth. In particular, this work analyses how already existing cultural frames in Namibian society mirrored the organisational structure of the UNIA and enabled its growth as a means to reconstitute Namibian socio-political institutions. This article also examines how, as indigenous Namibians assumed control of the South West African UNIA, divergent local ethnopolitical goals and ambitions re-emerged and momentarily parted from the message of pan-African unity espoused by the parent organisation, leading the association to falter in the territory by 1924.
Camps in Angola were crucial training grounds for the South African liberation army Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) from the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a period when the Angolan state army, FAPLA (Popular Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola), was itself engaged in a civil war. The official position of the African National Congress and the Angolan government was one of solidarity based on a common political cause. Drawing on interviews and published memoirs, this article compares the understandings of politics that existed within the two allied armies, and how these understandings shaped and were shaped by the encounters between the two military forces during the time that MK was in Angola. For both groups, international solidarity was secondary to a nationalist vision. MK soldiers were fighting a liberation struggle in which they saw the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as the ally of their own oppressors; FAPLA officers subscribed to ideas of solidarity but conscripted rank-and-file soldiers were reluctant participants in a civil war in which they recognised UNITA as compatriots. When MK soldiers were drawn into FAPLA's military operations against UNITA, these incompatible understandings of the nature and purpose of the Angolan conflict fuelled support for their 'mutiny' of 1983-84.
This article examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of violence against black farmworkers in South Africa through a critical reading of media discourse. While dominant narratives emphasise the vulnerability of white farmers in the so-called farm attacks, the routine killing of farmworkers by white farm owners receives minimal attention and is often framed as accidental or disciplinary. Drawing on 45 English-language newspaper reports from 1998 to 2022, we employ discourse analysis and Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation to interrogate how these incidents are archived, narrated and depoliticised in the public domain. We argue that the farm remains a site of enduring racial subjection, where colonial and apartheid logics of land ownership, labour discipline and anti-black violence persist in the current democratic social order. We trace the repetition of fatal violence against farmworkers across decades as a means of managing white anxiety over land restitution and black autonomy. The framing of the killing of farmworkers as reckless serves to reaffirm white authority and preserve the racial hierarchies embedded in South Africa's farms. This article contributes to the scholarship on land, race and rural labour by reinterpreting these killings not as isolated events, but as the afterlives of dispossession and the contested meanings of living on the land in the current democratic social order.
This article argues that the major cause of political protests in South Africa is elite contestation in the African National Congress (ANC). Elite contestation rocketed from around 2006 to 2013 and then, strangely, stabilised until 2018. This period of stabilisation coincided with the period of Jacob Zuma's presidency associated with state capture, that is, from around 2013. We suggest that former president Zuma managed to establish an internal compact in the ANC through violence, intimidation and, primarily, patronage. Cyril Ramaphosa was unable to maintain this compact, which is why protest activity soared after 2018, reaching insurrectionary proportions in 2021 and now, with the formation of the MK Party, this compact breaks up altogether. We conclude by suggesting that as elite contestation becomes more polycentric, some of it is likely to leave the political scene altogether, mutating into organised crime.
This article asks how and when the history of South African sport has been written, by whom, and how the scholarship was shaped by its political, social and intellectual contexts. A striking and rapid expansion of academic work on the history of South African sport is a relatively recent phenomenon as scholarly engagement occurred much later than might have been expected in a society where sport has been such a significant social and cultural pursuit. Three chronological phases in the historiography are identified. Firstly, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, when almost all historical work on South African sport was by scholars from outside the country. Reasons for the limited engagement by South African historians with a rapidly emerging sub-discipline are considered. Secondly, there was roughly a decade, from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, when the political context of a negotiated settlement and the advent of democracy directly and indirectly influenced a significant spurt in the production of sport history and the entry of a new cohort of scholars. An explicit and far-reaching recourse by sport historians to social history also emerged. Thirdly, from about 2004 to the present, there was a 'coming of age' of the genre in South Africa, the impetus and volume of work winning academic respectability and a confidence in the collective project. At the heart of that project has been the reclamation and reconstruction of the history of black sport, redressing decades of neglect and marginalisation. In each phase, as the historiography has been mapped, a distinctive feature is how inextricably the contours and terrain of sport have been interwoven with politics. And in turn, the politicised nature of South African sport shaped themes and directions of the historiography.
The world is currently witnessing two contrasting economic policy experiments. On the one hand, President Donald Trump aims to replace other tax revenues with tariff revenues. All empirical evidence suggests that this idea will fail. On the other hand, the signing of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) has put the dismantling of tariffs on the policy agendas of 54 African Union member states. The implementation of the AfCFTA will affect government revenue in member states and might require a switch from customs duties to other revenue sources such as income and value added taxes. Such revenue transitions may be politically difficult. This article analyses the two stages of South Africa's revenue transition, which occurred first after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and then during the democratisation process in the first half of the 1990s, to improve understanding of the constraints to and effects of such transitions. The transition from a tax revenue structure anchored by customs revenue to one dominated by income taxes and taxes on domestic consumption was a protracted and unplanned process. The general revenue needs of the government led to the introduction of income taxes in 1914 and a broad-based consumption tax in 1979. Excise taxes have been in use since 1910 and in recent times have also become increasingly important for other purposes. Along with the shift in the role of customs duties from revenue-generating to protective instruments, and extensive use of non-tariff barriers, these developments meant that import taxes became markedly less important tax handles during the course of the 20th century. As a result, the revenue implications of the trade liberalisation process in the early 1990s were minor.
In early 1960s Southern Rhodesia, a secretive underground of male nationalist youth envisioned a revolutionary army and pressed their political leaders to act. How they came to do so is a dramatic and largely neglected story of youthful political imagination, state violence and transnational military mobility, told in memoir and oral history. Many of the nationalist youth of this moment had first forged dreams of freedom as students in rural mission schools where they encountered astonishing stories of revolution and African independence. They concluded that educated, young leaders could transform the world and they energetically experimented with means of doing so before themselves joining the nationalist youth in townships. There they were confronted with a violent, intransigent settler state that forced them to reimagine routes to freedom. Evading this state produced the 'militarised mobilities' that took these young men into circuits of internationalist solidarity where they began to imagine the making of an army and the waging of war. Unusually among nascent liberation armies, they left Rhodesia as part of tightly organised nationalist youth networks intent on receiving military training and returned to these same networks as saboteurs and soldiers. Although their vision of warfare was not realised in these early years, it was the harsh lessons, personal relationships and eclectic revolutionary dreams of this moment that laid the foundations for the Zimbabwe African People's Union's liberation army.
