The armed struggle of the South African national liberation movement played out over the thirty years when the African National Congress (ANC) was illegal and based largely in exile. The development of an army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), made the ANC and South African Communist Party (SACP) close comrades in arms, a relationship that has fascinated scholars and memoirists, both loyalist and dissenter. Two new books bring these relationships into sharper focus without fully resolving some important questions about this history.

As editor of Africa Confidential (1986–91), Stephen Ellis was perturbed by the presence of communist cadres in the ANC. In Comrades against Apartheid he argued in 1992 that this presence was evidence of communist domination. Since then evidence from memoirs and newly accessible archives has facilitated a reconsideration of the issues, taken up by scholars such as Hugh Macmillan and now Ellis in an enlarged edition of his argument. In External Mission, Ellis focuses squarely on power and corruption. He aims to tell ‘roughly the same story’ as his 1992 book and ‘correct some of [its] errors’ (pp. 309–11). While his style – history combined with polemical journalism drawing upon many anonymous sources (notably securocrats and ANC dissidents) – is difficult, he presents even more examples of rampant corruption and excess of power by both Pretoria and the ANC. Yet, curiously, he draws conclusions only for the latter; Pretoria's ideological motivations in Godly capitalism remain unexplored. That armed struggle ‘was emerging in bits and pieces’ (p. 10) is well shown, as are examples of repressive methods imbibed from Eastern Europe. Yet he forecloses the possibility of seeking wider interviews and crowds out other motivations beyond power, such as human spirit, nationalism, freedom, or soft power. He draws but little on hundreds of recent SADET interviews, reflecting a distance from the movement. Some critics will read single-mindedness as imbalance.

His basic assumption is that the ANC's historic liberalism, deeply rooted in Christian communities and decades of patient agitating, was suppressed. Ellis makes a case that Oliver Tambo had to struggle as exile leader and gives evidence of diktat and violence. Yet he largely eschews contrary sources, such as Phakamani of the ANC Commission for Religious Affairs or interviews with clergy that could show how religious life continued in exile. Swift adoption of constitutional guidelines in the late 1980s suggests more than a tranquillized liberalism.

Wider analysis reveals more continuity in working with communists and in diplomacy, complicating his scenario of a seamless march to People's War even if policy pronouncements support such emphasis. Ellis's thesis that African nationalism was overridden by Stalinism makes good journalism but is undermined by his own evidence of dissenters and the exposure of Mandela's SACP ‘membership’ as but a brief sojourn eventually superseded by Africanity and Christianity. Ellis shows that Mandela attended Central Committee meetings and was inducted as a full member; but does this constitute genuine SACP leadership?

The significance of key military encounters such as the 1967 Hwange battles are well explicated through written sources but Ellis fails to probe deeper. Recent documentaries such as The Luthuli Detachment (Zolile Nqose, 2007) give voice to vernacular accounts by veterans as well as local peoples. We learn that Che Guevara was with MK trainees in Algeria and in Egypt they trained with the first Palestinian fighters before going to Ethiopia. Such nationalist, Pan-African, and non-alignment connections do not sit comfortably with Ellis's mono-causal emphasis on a Moscow axis.

The memoir of Barry Gilder, a white Jewish student activist/folk singer who went into exile in 1976 to become one such communist MK cadre, rising in the hierarchy from mosquito-infested boot camps to high position in MK and, after 1994, in state security, offers a striking contrast to Ellis's reading of the dynamics of exile. The story he tells is of a largely color-blind army. He gives direct insights into exile life in Angola and Botswana, discussing power but also highlighting a history of friendship. In contrast to Ellis's narrative of constant repression and ‘tribalism’, Gilder tells of resilience, vibrant culture, solidarity, and unity in action that helped assuage disunity, of alternating hope and despair. He describes an increasingly politicized army but also recounts the mundane, such as joy at arrival of trucks from Luanda. His individualism fades as he is ‘absorbed into this pulsating collective’ (p. 15) that builds family-like relationships. Yet family can sometimes breed patronage and he reflects on corruption. After 1994, he serves as deputy head of the South African Secret Service, National Intelligence Agency, and Home Affairs under Buthelezi, and as coordinator of intelligence. Divisions rear their head when, seeking to stop gang violence, he finds the opposition-led Western Cape and its police refuse cooperation with national intelligence. He is distraught at the Mbeki-Zuma feud that also plays out in intelligence structures. In 2009 an apartheid-era prosecutor who continues to use the threatening behavior of the 1980s interrogates Gilder.

In commenting on the inner workings of intelligence, Gilder is not uncritical but as an insider stresses that the ANC had to protect its people and maintain the high moral ground in the face of apartheid. Today in the wake of the Marikana massacre and corruption, this ethos seems distant, but at the time – both authors give evidence of spy penetration – it was a major goal. Some allegations of high-level corruption are true, he states, others false. Notions of nepotism little appreciate the depth of African cultures of reciprocity or extended family.

The authors give opposing views of SACP-ANC relations. Measuring influence is complex. Ellis exaggerates SACP's real power. Paul Landau and Keith Somerville argue that the SACP could not determine the timing of the ANC's turn to war and that in the end it was rather the ANC calling the tune.Footnote ¹ The value of External Mission lies less in startling revelations of Mandela's sojourn among the SACP or Mao Zedong's supposed influence. Rather, the depth of evidence makes it an important work, especially given how the micro-history of ANC archives raises questions about what may never be known. Similarly Gilder laments that de Klerk had 44 tons of security records destroyed in 1993. Ellis and Gilder open new pathways for the study of the uncomfortable realities of exile. Written from different empirical and theoretical standpoints, both books will be important sources when more comprehensive histories of the ANC-in-exile are written. Read together, as almost polar opposites, they shine a light on both the seamy underside and the hopes of exile.