The great storm of South Africa’s liberation struggle : bridging the gap between APLA and post-apartheid public & collective memory

Abstract

The post-apartheid liberation historiography has been constructed and curated in a way that influences public and collective memory to assume that only one liberation movement (the African National Congress) was involved in the South African liberation struggle. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and its armed wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), have largely been given perfunctory attention or totally ignored because of the selective politics of memory. In instances where the history of APLA and/or the PAC is given full attention, the focus has been on the leadership conflicts within it, at the expense of interrogating other important aspects within the movement. This thesis is a critical analysis of how public collective memory of post-apartheid South Africa has been curated, and it unpacks how victorious formations such as the ANC government have sought to entrench their political dominance by creating a skewed liberation narrative. This thesis further argues that this is related to the politico-philosophical inclinations of the dominant narrative that is hellbent on placing in the fringes radical ideas that are seen to have a potential of challenging the status quo. The thesis narrates the development of APLA, mapping its roots from the 1940’s confrontational spirit of African Nationalism to the establishment of the PAC in 1959. It then shows that the prohibition of PAC in 1960 led to it being overtly operated as Poqo – not that Poqo was a military wing of the PAC. This thesis dispels this notion by proving that PAC is Poqo. Furthermore, this thesis presents some of the major military activities of the PAC up until the ‘establishment’ of APLA in 1968 by the Africanist Task Force, which was the real paramilitary formation of the PAC before APLA. Although the thesis extensively discusses APLA interchangeably with the PAC, in the main chapters it delves into APLA operations and the experiences of cadres from exile through ‘return’ home and their post-apartheid integration and experiences within the new South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and their communities.