Spanning the years just before (and just after) Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest, this entirely fresh history of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, and its revolutionary milieu brings to life the period in which Mandela and his comrades fought South Africa’s apartheid regime not only with words and protests, but also with bombs and fire.
Paul S. Landau is a professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park and a fellow of the History Centre of the University of Johannesburg. His two previous books, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (1995) and Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (2010), were both finalists for the African Studies Association Herskovits Prize. Landau is interested in visual culture, religion, and popular politics. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.
“For those content to see Mandela as nothing more than everyone’s
favorite grandpa, this book will make for uncomfortable reading;
for those who want to appreciate Mandela in the fullness of his
life and of the choices he made with that complex and remarkable
life, this humdinger of a book will help them see Mandela in a new
and more illuminating light.”
*Jacob S. T. Dlamini, author of Safari Nation: A Social History of
the Kruger National Park and Askari: A Story of Collaboration and
Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle*
“Landau is rightly incensed with the elite nationalism of the ANC
and hints at how its fault lines can be traced back to the
sectarian pressure groups within the 1960s struggle movement. The
ANC hardly has ‘a good story to tell,’ but something truly fresh,
even sympathetic, emerges when the story of the struggle for
liberation is not homogenized around their triumphalist
mono-narrative tropes. Landau’s book leads the pack here.”
*Mail and Guardian*
“This retelling of the story of Nelson Mandela’s armed rebellion
between 1960 and 1964 is a fresh and exciting reinterpretation of a
narrative that too often is told with the distorting effects of
hindsight. Paul Landau has drawn upon conversations with a literal
army of informed participants, 250 people from the movement that
Mandela helped to make, its commanders, its foot-soldiers, and its
camp-followers. He has also reread and reinterpreted the
compendious archival record. Emerging from this research is a very
different Mandela from the kindly patriarch who wrote his memoirs
thirty years after these events: radical, tough-minded, and
calculating. This is the story of what Nelson Mandela at the time
of the rebellion was seeking to achieve, what he was thinking, and
what he actually did, day by day. Most importantly, Landau offers
new and persuasive explanations for the considerations that shaped
Mandela’s decision-making. Spear is an astonishing breakthrough
achievement.”
*Tom Lodge, University of Limerick, author of Sharpeville: An
Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences*
“Paul Landau offers us an outstanding book on Umkhonto we Sizwe,
with the figure of Nelson Mandela at the centre of the story. He
pays close attention to affective relationships among protagonists,
all too rare among male scholars. The book connects biography to
strategic political thinking in interesting new ways. Written in
Landau’s trademark lucid and engaging style, the study is critical
even while appreciative of the heroic ambitions of his subject.
This gripping read is a meticulous and pathbreaking contribution to
scholarship on revolutionary movements as well as to South African
historiography.”
*Shireen Hassim, author of Fatima Meer and The ANC Women's League:
Sex, Gender and Politics*
“Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries is one of the most
important books on South Africa to appear in more than a
generation. A masterpiece of analysis and careful historical
reconstruction, Landau revisits a crucial moment in the country’s
modern history, when a group of activists turned revolutionaries
led by Nelson Mandela pursued the overthrow of the racist apartheid
state. Concentrating on the early 1960s at the very moment South
Africa was becoming an authoritarian order, Landau brilliantly
reconstructs the world within which Mandela and others around him
committed themselves to revolutionary violence—what they read, the
debates that unfolded and, crucially, how they understood South
Africa in the wider world. Based on unparalleled research,
including an extraordinary array of interviews, Spear takes on a
range of controversial subjects: the decision to use violence, the
fractious struggles within the ANC’s leadership, and Nelson Mandela
himself. Empathic and iconoclastic, Landau’s discoveries may
unsettle some readers, but no one will be able to look at the early
1960s the way they used to, as well as the ANC’s three decade-old
grip on South Africa. This timely and learned book is mandatory
reading for anyone interested in South Africa, political violence,
and the end of colonialism."
*Clifton Crais, author of Poverty, War, and Violence in South
Africa*
Of tremendous benefit for college students at all levels as well as
for mainstream African history researchers.
*African and Asian Studies*
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