These allegations are contained in an updated and abridged edition of ‘People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa’ by Dr Anthea Jeffery, Head of Policy Research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in which the people’s war that gave the ANC the ‘state power’ it needed to implement its Soviet-inspired national democratic revolution (NDR) is analysed. The book is to be launched in Johannesburg on 4 June.
She argues that the NDR, which aims to take the country by incremental steps from a free market to a socialist and then communist system, is the key reason the country is doing so badly in so many spheres. But the NDR – which is the second part of a two-stage revolution – is hard to grasp without a sound understanding of the first stage: the people’s war waged by the ANC from 1984 to 1994.
The truth about the people’s war has long been consigned to George Orwell’s ‘memory hole’, while struggle myths abound. She says few South Africans know about the ANC’s visit to communist Vietnam in 1978. There the struggle fighters was instructed on the formula for a people’s war, as well as how that formula should be applied to destroy the ANC’s black rivals in the Black Consciousness movement and the IFP. “Few know that the tripling of the ‘kill’ rate in the early 1990s was not the work of the ‘third force’, but was instead orchestrated by the ANC with the help of the 13 000 Umkhonto fighters it was able to bring back under the cover of the negotiations process.
Anthea Jeffery’s penetrating analysis of the people’s war has been abridged and updated, and now includes a brief synopsis of the NDR to date. The book – and its importance in understanding the past, the present, and the future – will be discussed at its Johannesburg launch on 4 June 2019 by Anthea herself, along with former Azapo president Ishmael Mkhabela and John Kane-Berman, IRR policy fellow and former chief executive. IRR CEO Frans Cronje will facilitate the discussion.
