Professor Stephen Ellis Was Condemned by the ANC for Revealing Nelson Mandela’s Communist Affiliations
18th August 2015
Stephen Ellis was never a stranger to controversy. When he revealed beyond dispute that Nelson Mandela had been a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party (SACP) for a short period in the 1960s, he won bouquets from some of the world’s best respected Africanists and brickbats from almost every leading figure in the African National Congress.
In his best-selling book External Mission – The ANC in Exile 1960-1990 he said that Mandela had not only been a member of the Communist Party but that he had also been co-opted on to the SACP’s Central Committee.
Ellis believed that it was important to know this happened, not in order to discover reds under the beds, but in order to better understand the way that the SACP gave birth to the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
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