Dr Thula Simpson has spent a decade researching and writing on the history of the ANC’s liberation struggle. His research took him to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland the United Kingdom – and all over South Africa.
The results of Dr Simpson’s work have been published in a number of scholarly journals, including the Journal of Southern African Studies, African Studies, the South African Historical Journal, Social Dynamics and the African Historical Review, as well as in edited book collections published by Wits University Press, and the University of Cape Town Press. He is currently working on his first single-authored book, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle, which he says reflects the influences that first inspired him to be a historian. What he found interesting and worth studying was a passage in the MK Manifesto of 1961 that conveyed the idea of an insurgency that was launched in part to avoid civil war. He started to explore what it actually entailed. Although it clearly was not non-violent, it was not quite the type of insurgency so typical in other parts of the world. “The limits of violence and how far one can push those limits before the method becomes self-defeating is, if anything, more relevant now than then,” he says.
Towards the end of his doctorate research in 2007 he applied for and received the postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pretoria. The fellowship, and a subsequent three-year period when he received the University’s Research and Development Programme grant, provided the resources to do research on a much larger scale than was possible during his doctorate.
It was the richness of the source material that led to the actual writing of Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle. The book deals with the armed, military dimension of the struggle against apartheid. It begins in the 1950s with the ANC’s shift from non-violence towards armed struggle, and it continues up to the political settlement of the 1990s that laid the foundations for the new South Africa. The narrative consists of the stories of individuals on all sides of the conflict – whether insurgents, counter-insurgents or civilians – and the ways in which their lives interweave, and often clash, with the collisions occurring in major events in South African history.
“One sees the South Africa that we know begin to take shape … Most of the leaders of the new South Africa took their first steps onto the pages of history during the armed struggle. It is important to revisit the history of why certain outcomes were achieved while others were not. We have to listen to the voices of the past and learn, without having to repeat their experiences – in fact, precisely so as not to have to follow the same road – the lessons that were earned at a very high price regarding which paths, violent and non-violent, have proven to be fruitful, versus those that have been proven to be disastrous.”
