AFRICA

TODAY
A Multi-Disciplinary Snapshot
of the Continent in 1995

Edited by Peter F. Alexander,

Ruth Hutchison
and Deryck Schreuder

THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
CANBERRA
1996
168

Humanities Research Centre Monograph Series No. 12,

Australian National University

ISBN No. 0 7315 2491 8

First published 1996
Copyright © 1996

Cover: John Muafangejo, Angola 1943-Namibia 1987, also worked in South Africa
Men are working in town 1981, linocut, 59.6 x 41.8; 74 x 59.8 cm.

Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1992.

Copyright 1995 John Muafangejo.
Copyright licences to be applied to JMT, 4 Caudwells Castle, 5 Folly Bridge, Oxford OX
1 4LB.

Cover Design by Jodi Parvey

Layout and Design by Misty Cook and Jodi Parvey
Printed in Australia by Goanna Press, Fyshwick, Canberra
 169

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ILLUSTRATIONS
KEYNOTE PAPER
D. A. Low: Independence and Tropical Africa's Political
Trauma 1
HISTORY
John Omer-Cooper: South African History in Perspective 19
Christopher Saunders: Reflections on the South African
Transition 55
Patrick Chabal: The (De) Construction of the Postcolonial
Political Order in Black Africa 69
F. A. Mouton: 'A Cusser when Crossed': The Turbulent
Career of William Ballinger 79
John Lambert: Chiefly Collaboration in Colonial Natal. Case
Studies of Phakacle kaMacingwane and Thetheleku
kaNobanda 101
THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA
Heribert Adam: Deeply Divided or Pragmatically United?
Comparing Prospects of Democracy in Post-apartheid
South Africa 127
Jonathan Hyslop: Why was the White Right Unable to Stop
South Africa's Democratic Transition? 145
Bernard Leeman: The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania 167
LITERATURE
Christine Alexander: Imagining Africa: The Brontes' Creation
of Glass Town and Angri 201
Sue Kossew: Rlpresenting the Afrikaner: Andre Brink and
the Politics of Representation 221
Ray Younis: Songs of Travail, Songs of Enchantment:
Colonialist and Post-colonialist Discourses in
Contemporary Language and Literature 233
IMAGES OF AFRICA
Saul Dubow: Human Origins, Race Typology and the Other
Raymond Dart 245
Pal Ahluwalia: The Rwandan Crisis: Exile and Nationalism
Reconstructed 281
POLITICS
Pal Ahluwalia and Paul Nursey-Bray: Uganda: State and
Civil Society 303
Geoffrey Wood and Richard Haines: The Remaking of
Mozambique: The Impact of the 1994 Elections and the
Prospects. for Social and Economic Recovery 327
Phillip Darby and Albert Paolini: African Futures 345
Cherry Gertzel: Why Won't the Wars Stop? An Examination
of the Relationship between Resource Scarcity,
Inequality and Conf1iet in Somalia and Rwanda in the
170

Late Twentieth Century 365

WOMEN
Kogila Moodley: Colonizers, Settlers, Nationalists and
Women 395
P. Stavropoulos: Women and Agency in Colonial African
Contexts 417
Tanya Lyons and David Moore: Written in the Revolutions:
(Mis)Representations, the Politics of Gender and the
Zimbabwean National War 443
HEALTH AND MEDICINE
David Lucas, Lawrence Ikamari, Tapiwa Jhamba and
Chilumba Nalwamba: A Provincial View of Fertility and
Mortality Change in Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe 479
 171

21
BOOK REVIEWS (Professor Donald Denoon)
Peter Alexander, Ruth Hutchison and Deryck Schreuder (eds) Africa Today: a Multi-
Disciplinary Snapshot of the continent in 1995, Canberra. Humanities Research Centre,
ANU, 1996, 589pp. ISBN 07315 2491 8. no price stated.

ANU's Humanities Research Office organised three major conferences during ‘Africa
Year’, 1995. Africa Today presents the proceedings of the third contemporary conference.
This volume is handsomely and professionally presented and illustrated, and sees the light
remarkably soon after its conception- It is plainly not possible to do justice to 28 papers,
ranging through history, politics, literature, film, gender, health and environmental issues.
Predictably, their quality is uneven and the connections between the papers little
developed. Few could emulate the broad sweep of Anthony Low’s keynote review of
‘Independence and Tropical Africa’s Political Trauma although Patrick Chabal rises to the
occasion in his analysis of the post-colonial political order, Sau1 Dubow’s exploration of
Raymond Dart and the evolution of race typologies is continent-wide in its implications,
Cherry Gertzel develops a general theory by examining the wars in Rwanda and Somalia,
and the discussions of gender also aspire to continental judgments. The more closely-
focused papers are perfectly appropriate for a conference, but difficult to read sequentially
in print. Predictably again, ten papers investigate South African topics, four of them in the
History section. Together with three papers on The New South Africa' (by Heribert Adam,
Jonathan Hyslop and Bernard Leeman) these come closest to an interactive series.

One of the most remarkable is Bernard Leeman's very personal account of the Pan
Africanist Congress of Azania, to which he has devoted touch of his adult life. The PAC’s
perspective on South African politics is cogent, even if the institution's policies have
developed in a convoluted and sometimes opportunistic fashion. Membership of the PAC
and its affiliates often seems to reflect a radical temperament rather than a commitment to
specific strategies, tactics or outcomes. Given the many organisational and tactical
failings of the African National Congress, when it and its allies were the only rivals of the
PAC, the decline of the 1atter deserves the serious attention which Leeman gives to it. The
intimate connections with Lesotho politics and the fateful personality clashes among the
leaders are described in detail, as in the PAC’s calamitous performance in South Africa’s
first democratic elections. Throughout its forty years the PAC has settled into the role of
critic of the ANC, a function which seems certain to persist.

Jonathan Hyslop’s analysis of the South African `white right' and its ultimate failure
either to coalesce or to prevent the democratic transition, suggests some of the reasons why
the PAC's role may again become important. To avoid the risk of bloodshed, the ANC was
bound not only to seek an accommodation with the ruling National Party, but also to offer a
role to Constand Viloen’s Freedom Front; yet any conciliatory gesture laid it open to PAC
and other radical criticism. Had the PAC been as powerful as its 1980s rhetoric promised,
that conciliatory strategy might have been politically impossible - and the consequences of
a direct confrontation too alarming to contemplate.
Another paper which caught my attention because it addresses my earlier research
interest and analysis and is a highly topical issue, is Pal Ahluwalia-s analysis of ‘The
Rwanda crisis’. Events have rather overtaken this analysis, with tens of thousands of
Rwandan refugees being driven on death marches through eastern Zaire, and a Rwandan-
backed insurgency.
172

THE PAN AFRICANIST CONGRESS OF AZANIA

B e r na rd Le e man

L ie u te n an t- G en er al, A z an i an P e o p l e’ s L ib e r a tio n A r my,

Edu c a tio n S e cr e tar y, P an Af r ican is t C o ngr e ss of Azan ia

The ideological roots of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC)

included two of the most original and talented intellectuals of their
generation, Anton Muziwakhe Lembede and Ashley Peter Solomzi Mda,
while a third, Stephen Bantu Biko, was murdered while negotiating to
become the party's deputy leader and heir apparent. Within a year of the
foundation of the PAC in 1959 the party had not only captured the support
and imagination of African youth but had also persuaded world opinion to
treat the National Party (NP) minority regime in South Africa as a pariah. By
1963 its military operations seriously threatened the security of the south-east
corner of the country and by 1978 it had trained two guerrilla armies in exile,
launching one of them into Lesotho the following year. In 1994, the PAC, a
party historically identified with the landless, the oppressed, youth, and the
unemployed, won a mere 1.2 percent of the vote in the South African
election, in which the African National Congress (ANC), a party associated
with the employed, the urban elite and compromise, took office with the NP.
This paper examines the reasons for these extraordinary extremes in the
fortunes of the PAC.
The first question to answer is why was the PAC necessary? Why did its
founding members consider the ANC an inadequate organisation to lead the
African political struggle?
By the 1940s, there was general dissatisfaction among the rising African
generation with the ANC and Communist Party (CPSA). The ANC Christian
liberal dream of assimilation had been shattered by the 1936 Land Act and
crippling of the Cape franchise, while the CPSA had been discredited by the
Soviet Union's pacts with Britain, France and Nazi Germany, and the
Comintern's disbanding of Padmore's International Trade Union Committee
of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW). After deciding against forming a new
political party, Anton Lembede (1914-47), an intellectual from a poverty-
stricken Zulu background, revived and invigorated the almost moribund ANC
in 1944 when he formed its Youth League. He concluded that Africans would
be better served by policies of mass action and self-reliance and founded the
School of African Nationalism with Ashley P. Mda, in Orlando East, an
institution attended even by future opponents of the Africanists, such as Nelson
Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. Mda had joined Kadalie's ICU in
its dying days and also the CPSA, quitting over its refusal to implement the
Black Republic policy, and took over leadership of the Africanists after
Lembede's death in 1947. Mda suffered from poor health and lacked
Lembede's dynamism but by 1950, when he retired from the leadership of the
Youth League, never again to stand for political office, he had succeeded in
winning over many adherents from the African intellectual elite at University
College, Fort Hare, to the Africanist Movement.
 173

Mda wanted to create a modern version of the Southern African initiation

lodge, a clandestine, powerful and influential peer group to whom even the
most prominent African leaders would be answerable. He ostensibly worked
for a long-term strategy which kept the leading Africanists out of mainstream
ANC politics, claiming that the Africanists were too young, too few, and too
inexperienced to make a significant impact at such an early stage, but they
gained a partial success with the adoption in 1949 of a diluted version of their
demands in the Programme of Action. However, Mda's group's refusal to
stand for office cost the movement dearly, allowing Mandela, Sisulu and
Tambo to make an early impact on the ANC and paving the way for their
eventual leadership.
Although Mda s Africanists were active during the 1952 Defiance
Campaign, the reluctance of Mda and other intellectuals to undertake grass-
roots agitation would have probably doomed the Africanist Movement to be
nothing more than a small but respected pressure group similar to the
Trotskyist Unity Movement but for the grass-roots agitation of Potlako
Leballo, an ex-soldier from Lesotho. Members of the Africanist Inner Circle
were reluctant to allow a mass leadership to develop. Burgess, unjustly
criticising Sobukwe, did identify this phenomenon when he wrote:
Leballo and Madzunya were more concerned with propagating Africanism in order to
incite mass action than with projecting a correct ideological image. The petty bourgeois
intellectuals such as A. P. Mda and M. R. Sobukwe, encouraged African mass involvement
but intended that the leadership of the Africanists remain under the control of the
intelligentsia. The notion persisted among the Africanists that the educated intellectuals had
to play the leading role in guiding the mobilised African masses towards liberation and in
properly defining the Africanist ideology.1

Until Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe became a lecturer at the University of

the Witwatersrand, the Africanists did not have a leader of professional
stature to match those who had traditionally led the ANC and CPSA. The
Defiance Campaign boosted ANC party membership from about 25,000 to
over 100,000 but the changing post-war social conditions in the Transvaal
townships was bringing new types of leaders to prominence, ones that were
from less prestigious backgrounds-teachers, petty entrepreneurs, ex-soldiers
and clerks. P. K. Leballo was from this new group and despite academic
interest in Sobukwe, the history of the PAC belongs more to Leballo, whose
political career had important consequences not only for South Africa but
also Lesotho. Leballo was born a chief in the south-west Lesotho village of
Lifelakoaneng overlooking the Basotho 'lost Lands' in the Orange Free State
and his political outlook was largely governed by his Basotho background.
He saw the problems of Lesotho and South Africa as indivisible and until
1960 led the strongest and wealthiest branch of the Basutoland Congress
Party (BCP) while remaining prominent in the African National Congress
(ANC) and founding the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). His propagation of
a Pan-Africanist political party was ostensibly in line with Padmore's
Ghanaian based Pan African version of the Comintern but solved his own
dilemma of wishing to be active in the affairs both of Basutoland and South
Africa. The PAC had a predominantly Basotho membership and members
often switched between BCP and PAC and their military wings. The only two
White members of the PAC had Basotho backgrounds and close friendships
with the Basutoland political hierarchy.2 Leballo's Basotho connections revived
174

the PAC's fortunes in the 1970s. This link enabled the party to challenge the
ANC in exile as well as threaten the Basotho National Party (BNP) regime in
Lesotho; and Leballo's early death in 1986 was due to his hypertension
incurred through his success in splitting the Lesotho military-BNP alliance and
blackmailing General Lekhanya into a coup.3
Leballo's generation in Basutoland was proud of its heritage as being the
only people in southern Africa to hold out against White invasion and regain
relative independence in the
1880--84 Gun War when they defeated the Cape forces. There was a
justified belief among the Basotho that, if they had been allowed access to the
Cape gunpowder market in the nineteenth century fight for western Lesotho,
they would have defeated the Orange Free State Boers and kept their fertile
lands. Secondly, although British meddling was to throw the whole system of
the Basotho chieftainship into chaos by the mid-1930s, the Basotho of
Leballo's generation still had confidence in their highly democratic rural
society of communal labour and land tenure. Leballo had no illusions about
Arcadian idylls but had an understanding of and faith in southern Africa's rural
poor. He believed that if political leaders stood with the lowest strata of society
they could achieve and be anything they wanted. To a certain extent he thought
more in Basotho than South African terms, of turning South Africa into a
greater Lesotho from which all the paraphernalia of the complex capitalist
urban and decadent feudal rural White society would be swept away.
Leballo attended Lembede's school and became an ardent Africanist. After
the 1949 Programme of Action conference he joined both Mda's Hard Core
and Inner Circle groups within the Africanist Movement.4
The Defiance Campaign received most support in the traditional ANC
heartland of the Eastern Cape with its liberal Christian political tradition, but
the mass expansion of the party after the campaign testified to the challenge of
the townships around Pretoria and Johannesburg where the population was
younger, more radical and less accommodating. Draconian NP legislation
terminated the United Party policy of permitting near assimilation of highly
educated Africans and this not only closed the path for the African elite to
share many privileges enjoyed by Whites, but forced them to turn to African
support to regain what they had lost, a role which many disliked and for which
they were ill-suited. Unable to compete with agitators such as Leballo and
Josias Madzunya, the new ANC leaders found common cause with the
clandestine Communist Party, which drew on decades of international
experience in speaking for and controlling mass movements without being
answerable to them. At the same time, the new ANC leader, Lutuli, was
restricted to his farm in Natal and unable to exercise his authority effectively in
the Transvaal where the future of the ANC was being decided.
Although Africans formed the majority of the CPSA membership and had
accomplished some important political work such as the 1946 Miners' strike,
the party leadership was overwhelmingly White and from the professions.
Indubitably dedicated and hardworking, the Communist Party leadership
remained strangely detached from the gut feelings of the African population, as
evidenced by its pronouncement as late as 1962 that 'Africans live in every part
of our country'. In 1950 the party voluntarily disbanded to escape prosecution
under new legislation and therefore could not campaign openly for support,
even though it reconstituted itself secretly as the South African Communist
 175

Party (SACP) at the beginning of 1953. The party was more suited to a
clandestine role since it strongly identified with Lenin's What is to be Done?
theory that ten professional revolutionaries were better than a hundred 'fools'.
This secretive role isolated the SACP leadership further from township life,
and their work of cultivating African leaders in their homes in the more
prosperous suburbs of Johannesburg brought ridicule and contempt from
Leballo and other agitators. The ANC leadership of Lutuli, Tambo, Sisulu
and Mandela became increasingly elitist for although they represented a new
generation, psychologically they belonged to the pre-1940s era before the
party became a mass movement. They wished to speak for the African masses
but were averse to dealing with them on an equal footing. As Africanist
support grew through Leballo's work in the 1950s, the ANC and SACP
leaderships joined together into an increasingly undemocratic elitist clique to
combat this new phenomenon of Africans from less prestigious backgrounds
demanding a greater say in how the party should be run.
The strategy chosen to neutralise the Africanists was initiated in 1953 by
the ANC Cape leader, Professor Z. K. Matthews, who sought a larger role for
minority groups in anti-apartheid agitation. Matthews' call for a Congress of
the People which would adopt a Freedom Charter was unsuccessfully
opposed by the Africanists, who considered the Programme of Action an
adequate statement of national objectives. Critics were denied funds to travel
to, or (in the case of Leballo) banned from, vital meetings, while Lutuli
formalised close links in March 1954 with the Indian Congress, the newly
formed (White) Congress of Democrats (COD) and the Coloured Peoples
Organisation (SACPO), followed in 1955 by the South African Congress of
Trade Unions (SACTU). All four of these organisations had secretary-
generals belonging to the clandestine SACP while Sisulu, the ANC secretary
general, and the ANCYL leaders elected in June 1954, Joe Matthews and
Duma Nokwe, were associated with the Moscow-oriented faction of the
party.5 A National Action Council (NAC) was established consisting of two
representatives from each of the four organisations (ANC, SAIC, SACPO and
COD) to prepare the Freedom Charter and Congress of the People. The
SACP publication New Age gave the venture wide publicity but also
confirmed the Africanists' fears of SACP manipulation by printing the
resolutions of the ANC Annual Conference of 1954 before the conference
even convened. By the time the Congress of the People convened in June
1955, Lutuli had been marginalised. The Charter was written by Joe Slovo
and other White SACP leaders and distributed by the thousand before the
Congress of the People met, preventing amendments. Neither Lutuli nor Dr
William Conco, his representative at the Congress of the People, saw the
Freedom Charter before it was adopted by acclaim.6
The ANC's adoption of the Freedom Charter seriously weakened the
party and cost it the support of the younger generation of politicised Africans.
The Charter declared that there should be 'equal status in the bodies of state,
in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races.' In
accordance with this resolution, the ANC, SACPO, SAIC, COD and the
newly formed SACTU were created equal partners in an ANC Congress
Alliance, each organisation having one member in the Executive. This
structure was duplicated right down the national structure to the branches,
thus relegating the 100,000 strong ANC to a position equal to the less than
176

500 strong COD. The clandestine SACP therefore controlled four of the five
positions on the executive and Slovo consolidated the SACP grip by using his
powers on the Allied Disciplinary Committee to expel ANC members from
the ANC for protesting against the Congress of the People and the Freedom
Charter. Qhobela Molapo, the future Lesotho Foreign Minister, at that time
working for New Age, stated,
The African National Congress was just used. I'm sorry to say this. It was just used
by the other, smaller organisations. I'm not questioning the sincerity of the people who
sat in other bodies like SACTU and COD-I would hate to give that impression-but ... at
National Executive level-that is, in regard to the Congress Alliance-the African National
Congress was not given its proper due in view of the preponderance in membership.
Even at national level, very few people knew what the Freedom Charter was about.7

The Freedom Charter only supported a universal franchise specifically

linked to the multi-racial executive structure. This was not an oversight for
Oliver Tambo emphasised this point when he rewrote the ANC Constitution in
1957.
Lutuli was now placed in a dilemma, unable at first to accept the Freedom
Charter but unwilling to commit himself to the 'uncouth' but democratic
demands of the Africanists, whom he ostensibly opposed on Christian grounds,
equating their attacks on the SACP with racism and McCarthyism. He and
other ANC leaders of his outlook decided at length to support the Freedom
Charter and adhere to the strategy of building up a multi-racial professional
elite able to direct African agitation in order eventually to present itself for
support the Freedom Charter and adhere to the strategy of building up a
multi-racial professional elite able to direct African agitation in order
eventually to present itself for election to parliament. This 'direction from
above' contrasted with the Africanists' 'direction from below' associated with
Leballo and Madzunya. The Charterists (supporters of the Freedom Charter)
were deeply worried that Africanist agitation would inflame unknown rural
forces who, combining with volatile township elements and tsotsis, would
bring open racial conflict, in which they would have no relevance.
The Congress Alliance attempt to exclude the Africanists from influencing
ANC policy was thwarted by the Treason Trial of 1956-61, which removed
156 members of anti-government organisations from the scene and left many
key ANC positions in the hands of heavy-handed, corrupt or incompetent
administrators, who were unable to deal effectively with rising Africanist
criticism of the effects of the Freedom Charter. By the end of 1957 the
Transvaal ANC was in crisis and as 1958 progressed Sobukwe, Leballo and
Madzunya were in full cry, firstly against the acting local leadership and then
the national leadership itself. In November the Africanists were forcibly
prevented from attending the Transvaal Conference and the next month, after
deliberations with the BCP leader, Ntsu Mokhehle, in Basutoland, the decision
was taken to form a new party. Mokhehle stated later:
Mr Potlako Leballo was the BAC Provincial Secretary in the Transvaal when they
started the PAC-the decision to break away from the ANC was taken in Maseru before
me-and Leballo was the link between the Pan Africanist group in the ANC and BAC.
From the Transvaal Provincial Secretary, Leballo easily became the Secretary-General-
this we did to keep the PAC-BAC links strong and it continued until 1960. Leballo is the
real founder of the PAC-and he is the man who decided, promoted and sponsored
Sobukwe's presidency of the PAC-some ignorant people may be startled by this and tend
 177

to challenge it-but it just happens to be true-here much of what I say took place before
me and, to a greater extent than not with my help. 8

The formation of the Pan Africanist Congress in April 1959

removed the younger, more militant membership from the ANC to such
an extent that when guerrilla war began, after Sharpeville, Mandela, the
Umkhonto we Sizwe commander, had to rely on SACP Whites to
organise and run the ANC's new military wing. 9
Leballo had also had over eight years experience as the leader of the
Transvaal Province of the Basutoland Congress Party, its most
powerful, wealthy and militant branch. The BCP had seized the
political initiative through its agitation against British directed
administrative reform which it believed was aimed at facilitating
incorporation of the protectorate into South Africa. In January 1960 the
BCP won the first legislative assembly elections held in the country, as
well as gaining control of eight of the nine local government district
councils. It humiliated the elitist Progressive Party, which disbanded
after the election, and the Canadian Catholic missionary creation, the
Basotho National Party, which represented the minor chieftaincy.
Through Ntsu Mokhehle, the PAC had established a link with the All
Africa People's Convention (AAPC), of which he was a member of the
Steering Committee. In addition, Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian
leader, sent funds to launch the PAC. 1960 was the year in which many
African countries became independent, and the Africanists noted with
satisfaction that in places such as Tanganyika multi-racial elitist parties
were heavily defeated in national elections. It seemed that the ANC's
external links and elite multi-racial alliances would serve them worse
than the Pan African popularist approach of the Africanists. The Pan
Africanist Congress was founded at a conference on 6 and 7 April 1959.
The new party identified the White power structure, the Union, as being
responsible for African misery. The PAC declared that reforming the
White state was a worthless task as it was basically evil and should be
replaced by a democratic socialist African structure which would unite with the
rest of Africa into a single United States of Africa. The party acknowledged
that while the PAC respected Christianity and Marxism, the party had been
forced to reject their messages as the path to liberation because of the self-
serving anti-democratic behaviour of their representatives in South Africa.
Leballo, Sobukwe and Madzunya were the leading candidates for the post of
party president. Leballo nominated Sobukwe, who was elected unopposed, and
then secured the post of secretary general. Madzunya was elected treasurer but
his votes were switched with those of A. B. Ncgobo, because the new leaders,
including Leballo, believed he would incapable of undertaking such
administrative work." This alienated Madzunya and his considerable following
in Alexandra township. Of the PAC National Executive Committee (NEC) five
were from a Xhosa background, six Sotho, and four Zulu. Mda did not stand
for office but retained his enormous influence over his protégés. At least nine
of the fourteen NEC members had some university education, and another later
took a degree but many of the party members were young unemployed urban
males, who despised the Westernised middle class but felt themselves above
manual labour, and represented the 'illiterate and semi-literate African masses'
the PAC intended to inspire into seizing power.
178

Leballo stated that he feared he would be nominated for the post of

president and win it. He believed the party needed an intellectual, which is why
he successfully nominated Sobukwe, thus establishing some sort of record
since he had nominated Lutuli, the ANC leader, in 1952. Other commentators,
such as Burgess, speculated that a desire within the new party to show they
could match the ANC leadership's educational attainment put Leballo in
jeopardy of winning any seat on the NEC. Certainly the composition of the
new NEC was a warning signal for the future when PAC leaders tried
appealing to the ANC's preserve, the relatively prosperous urban African elite,
instead of to the lower strata of society.
Until 1959 Leballo had been cast as the perpetual rebel. Now, as PAC
secretary-general, he undertook a new role. Within three months he oversaw
the expansion of the party to 24,664 members dispersed throughout 101
branches. Progress slowed somewhat but by December the ANC expressed
disquiet at the new figures of 31,035 members in 153 branches and a new
trade union movement, 17,000 strong.
Pressure to achieve results to give the party and its leaders credibility, to
upstage the ANC/SACP, and to work for continental freedom by 1963, as
propagated by the AAPC in Ghana, propelled the PAC into early action. The
PAC chose the Pass Laws as their target for nation-wide protest. They
intended to set an example, to be copied nationally, of presenting themselves
for arrest for refusing to carry passes, hoping that thousands upon thousands
of Africans would swamp the police stations and courts, a process that would
lead to strikes, chaos and the rapid breakdown of White government.
Leballo urged the party to prepare for inevitable violence but Sobukwe
insisted on passive resistance, although the party membership was young,
volatile, impatient and thus ill-suited to such a role.
The Sharpeville massacre occurred within hours of the PAC launching its
campaign on 21 March 1960, and was followed by riots and more killing.
Although the Pass laws were suspended on 26 March, too many levels of the
PAC leadership had been arrested for the party to maintain adequate direction
of the national campaign. On 30 March the party lost its greatest opportunity
to make a significant impact when the PAC West Cape regional secretary,
Philip Kgosana, dismissed his 30,000 followers from the centre of Cape
Town and thus lost the power to bargain for concessions. On 8 April both
PAC and ANC were banned.
The Poqo rising had already broken out in the eastern Cape by the time
Leballo escaped to Lesotho from restriction in Tongaland in August 1962.11
The PAC's Cape branches instigated some of the violence but also linked up
with peasants who were attacking chiefs and other government officials in the
Transkei.
Leballo became acting PAC president with Sobukwe's assent and when
Zephaniah Mothopeng arrived in Maseru after completion of his jail term, he
brought Sobukwe's agreement for armed conflict. In October Leballo
managed to get a plane out of Maseru over flying South Africa and was
disturbed to find the external missions had done little to organise military
training. Only a few troops were undertaking training in Egypt. Nevertheless,
Nkrumah supplied the PAC with a Swedish freighter which was then loaded
with arms in Egypt. Violence escalated late in 1962.
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Transkei chiefs were assassinated, and a mass PAC attack at Paarl killed
two White policemen. Nkrumah's ship was due to rendezvous with Poqo on the
Transkei coast and although it reached the Indian Ocean in early 1963 and
visited Madagascar, it then vanished, reputedly sold for a profit by persons
unknown, although suspicion fell on Vus Make, who later achieved notoriety
as a particularly corrupt official. The failure to supply arms to Poqo
undermined resistance, which remained strong in the Cape but was not
adequately backed in the Transvaal. In February five Whites were murdered at
a camp site. In March the PAC agreed to launch a national rising on 8 April,
and on 21 March, Sharpeville Day, the party said the time was ripe for a
'Knock-out blow' against the White population and warned that women and
children might suffer in the coming violence.
This period was the most controversial of Leballo's career, and centres on a
press conference he and the PAC publicity secretary, Z. B. Molete, gave in
Maseru on 24 March 1963 to a single journalist behind closed doors which
critics claim betrayed the whole rising by alerting the police and enabling them
to capture documents identifying thousands of militants. However, the events
of that period do not match such a scenario. First of all a sense of panic had
already afflicted White South Africa. Parliament had been told that security in
the Transkei was deteriorating, despite the establishment of Home Guard units
in every town as well as thirty-five towns in the rest of the country. Judge
Snyman's commission had called for 'drastic steps' to be taken because 'Poqo
was stronger than ever'. 12 The opposition United Party had been critical of the
National Party regime for being too slow in dealing with Poqo. Leballo wanted
to maintain the feeling of panic and in this he succeeded. Patrick Duncan, who
served the PAC as its representative in Algeria, speculated that Leballo, with
historical precedents to guide him, may have hoped for South African
retaliation against Lesotho, which would force the British to commit troops. 13
Nkrumah's success in hounding South Africa out of the Commonwealth, and
alerting world opinion against the NP regime, gave the PAC hope of external
aid. The day after the press conference the Rand Daily Mail had a banner
headline 'Black Wave Nears' with Leballo's claim that Poqo was 155,000
strong, divided into 1,000 cells waiting the word to attack, while Die Burger
announced the police and army were standing by and John Vorster, the
Minister of Justice, had assured parliament that action was imminent. Soon
after the press conference, two PAC couriers were arrested with 70 letters from
Leballo warning PAC activists to exercise extreme caution.
On 1 April any hope of the British protecting the PAC against South
African aggression was obliterated when the British-led police in Basutoland
raided PAC headquarters in Maseru. Leballo escaped with the help of a
Mosotho policeman and was taken to hide at Ha Tsiu, on the outskirts of
Maseru, by Mokhehle and Pokela. Seventy-three arrests resulted from the
capture of the letters, followed by 3,246 more, which gives rare credence to
one of the claims in Gordon Winter's universally condemned book that a list of
4,000 PAC/Poqo activists had been copied from PAC headquarters before the
raid.14
The Maseru raid marked the end of Leballo's attempt to direct an armed
rising in South Africa from a local base and any faith he had of the British
aiding the African struggle. When he eventually emerged from hiding five
months later, Poqo had been crushed and the British deported him from
180

Basutoland, his birthplace, under South African pressure in August 1964.

Basutoland was already in political turmoil as the BCP fought for early
independence, while combating well financed SACP coup attempts on the BCP
leadership and creation of two Moscow-allied rival parties. The British
introduced paramilitary forces in all three protectorates at the end of 1963 to
combat anti-South African insurgency and one reason for Leballo's expulsion
was to prevent him standing as a BCP candidate, like Robert Matji of the ANC,
in the pre-independence elections. Other consequences of the BCP's
cooperation with the PAC during Poqo were British efforts to bolster the
royalist Marematlou Freedom Party, and the South African-Canadian
missionary alliance to revive the Basotho National Party (BNP). The BNP won
the 1965 pre-independence election on a minority vote through support from
the female Catholic population and a ban on voting for the thousands of
Basotho working in South Africa. The new government accepted a single
citizenship policy and when Leballo traded in his British passport for a
Lesotho one, the BNP administration kept the former and refused to issue the
latter.15
Leballo was ill-suited to exile, especially after the 1966 coup in Ghana.
The Pan African ideal was fatally wounded through military coups
throughout the continent and a crack-down on Pan Africanist revolutionaries
such as John Okello, the Ugandan who overthrew the Arab regime in
Zanzibar. The ANC/SACP alliance prospered in such conditions, able to
relate well to the new increasingly undemocratic African elites and the
governing circles of the western and eastern blocs, while Leballo, in his
element as a grass-roots activist, found exile a living death. Leballo
established the Azanian People's Liberation Army under Templeton Ntantala,
the party having accepted the name of Azania for the country to symbolise
the alternative state they wished to create in place of the White republic.
About a hundred recruits went for training in Ghana, Egypt, and Algeria,
while more went to China at a later date. With Mda silent, Sobukwe confined
on Robben Island and Pokela kidnapped in 1967, Leballo undertook the
PAC's ideological transformation in exile as best he could and turned to
Maoism.
The Chinese experience had not figured to any significant extent in the
Africanist movement, mainly because of censorship. Sobukwe, studying at
Fort Hare in the late-1940s had found it difficult even to obtain Edward
Roux's Time Longer than Rope 16 while Ntsu Mokhehle stated that most of the
available CPSA literature had been translated into stilted English. While
some commentators criticised the PAC for the move to Maoism, Leballo felt
vindicated to a certain extent by the success of the BCP in opposition in
Lesotho. While the BCP hierarchy was active in parliament exposing the
inadequacies of the inept BNP government, the lower echelons of the party
controlled the local government district councils and showed that peasant
directed communal enterprises had more success than those initiated by
foreign experts in alliance with the undemocratic minor chieftaincy. Maoism
provided lessons Leballo believed applicable to the PAC's dilemma of how to
adjust to exile. The Poqo rising and other manifestations of violent hatred of
foreign domination were comparable to the Taiping, Nian and Boxer risings in
China, where brutal behaviour had alienated peasants and townspeople alike.
Mao's Red Army guerrillas had won support and admiration through their
 181

deliberate policy of paying for goods, helping with problems, and bringing a
better administration than the one they were fighting. Mao's New Democracy
also challenged the orthodox revolutionary path espoused by Moscow and the
SACP. Following massacres in the cities and further disasters incurred from
trying to capture urban centres in line with Stalin's instructions, Mao concluded
that the revolution should be led and supported by all classes, not just the
industrial proletariat, national capitalists, and intellectual patriots. In the event,
the peasantry were recruited and trained in the Red Army to bring about a
successful revolution. Next, Mao chose a base at Yan’an in the remote north-
west of China where the Red Army University gave basic practical training to
all ranks, while at the same time emphasising that each soldier had something
unique to contribute to the revolution. In addition, Beijing was not recognised
as the legitimate government of China by the United States, which appealed to
Leballo, the perpetual outsider. Lastly, Beijing, while supporting armed
revolution by the oppressed, was quick to criticise excesses by the elites of
newly independent countries.
The shift to Maoism exacerbated the strains within the PAC exiled
leadership. Some felt that it reflected poorly on the party that Leballo was
neither a university graduate nor a commissioned army officer. Secondly,
Leballo did not drink and disliked socialising. Like Lembede, he found elite
African society decadent. This writer found that outside party work Leballo
was happiest reading military history, particularly on Rommel. He avoided the
cocktail circuit and was frustrated with the lack of urgency and commitment he
encountered with the post-independence leadership. He worked hard and
demanded standards, particularly punctuality, from his followers. This writer
witnessed Leballo's frequent agitation if someone was late by even less than a
minute for an appointment or rendezvous, and often had to rewrite drafts for
speeches or publications for him at short notice. This style of leadership was
not popular with many exiles, who, for the first time in their lives, could relax
without fear of police harassment and enjoy opportunities denied them in
South Africa. These ranged from scholarships to inter-racial sex. Leballo
arrived in Dar es Salaam in September to establish the party's external
headquarters under the supervision of the OAU Liberation Committee,
founded there in 1963. Immediately he faced attempts to oust him as leader
by status-conscious members of the PAC hierarchy who sneered at him as a
tsotsi-an uneducated thug. There were already over ten external PAC
representatives and they were more interested in personal advancement than
recruiting and arranging training for APLA. Burgess stated:
In exile, the tendency towards self-advancement had turned many former reliable and
dynamic PAC members into self-seeking and corrupt individuals.17

Peter 'Molotsi and Nana Mahomo were suspended in February 1964 for
squandering resources. In October A. B. Ncgobo was investigated for
misappropriation as was Nyaose, the trade union leader in July 1965. In April
1966 Peter Raboroko and A. B. Ncgobo were investigated for
mismanagement. In 1966 relative stability had been restored and the party
absorbed members of the Coloured People's Congress who had rejected the
ANC reformist approach. Patrick Duncan, son of a former Governor General
of South Africa, joined the PAC and served as its representative in Algeria.
He was expelled from the party for congratulating his protege, League
182

Jonathan, on his election victory. The PAC could not afford BCP displeasure,
which was the reason for the expulsion.
The ideological struggle continued within the PAC. Leballo adhered to
the Maoist line, which emphasised mass mobilisation in the revolutionary
development of national independence, socialism and internationalism. This
was unacceptable to the external mission personnel who favoured reformism
and reliance on external powers. Burgess summarised the attitude of the
latter:
Many of the dissidents were intellectually inclined individuals who had played a
significant role in founding the PAC and who aspired to higher class positions. An attitude
persisted among the dissidents which was resentful of the leadership roles given to those
who were from less-educated and lower class backgrounds; this partly explains the antagonism
of PAC dissidents to P. K. Leballo. 18

Leballo, the orator and activist, found it extremely difficult to deal with
elitist colleagues in exile for he was no longer able to appeal to party
membership directly. In August 1966 a paper supporting a reformist solution
to South Africa was presented by Raboroko, A. B. Ncgobo, and Selby Mvusi
at a UN conference in Brazil. This they falsely attributed to Leballo. In
October Leballo dissociated the party from this stance. Raboroko and Ncgobo
were suspended but received support from Nyaose, Molotsi, and Mahomo, all
of whom called for an open convention to have their views adopted as official
policy, reasoning that in exile they had the numbers to oppose Leballo. In
July 1967 Ncgobo and Raboroko launched an unsuccessful coup. Tanzanian
intervention enabled the party to meet in Moshi in September where Leballo
at last pushed through acceptance of the Maoist line with his twenty-two page
document PAC's Revolutionary Message to the Nation. Ncgobo was
suspended as treasurer and replaced by David Sibeko.
The Revolutionary Message was an attempt to put forward a clearly
stated plan of the PAC's future strategy. It strongly condemned elitism and
attempts to reform South Africa with international help. It intended to
transform the external PAC from a political party into a politicised military
force which would launch a people's war and administer territory as it
expanded from bases in the remoter areas of South Africa. The Azanian
People's Liberation Army, the equivalent of Mao's Red Army, would have a
sense of service and not be associated with atrocities as in the days of Poqo.
Leballo also drew heavily from the example of Vietnam.
Not only did the external office personnel baulk at the plan to enlist them
into a purely military organisation, but Raboroko, Nyaose, Mahomo and
'Molotsi all thought Ncgobo had been victimised unfairly. At the end of the
year dissent broke out in the Lusaka office, to where the PAC had moved its
headquarters to direct the guerrilla infiltration south. Letlaka and Molete were
not only opposed to the infiltration but had misappropriated funds sent to
finance it. In April 1968 they denounced Leballo and the new revolutionary
command and appealed to the Zambian government for assistance. The
Zambians, already alarmed by the consequences of backing ANC and PAC
attacks respectively through Rhodesia and Mozambique, closed the PAC camp
at Senkobo and detained Leballo for a month. The PAC withdrew to Tanzania
and set up a joint training camp with the Zimbabweans at Chunya near Mbeya.
This gave heart to the reformist wing which increased its efforts to denounce
 183

Leballo and the power given to younger less educated members willing to
fight. At length the Tanzanians intervened and an OAU commission of enquiry
was convened in November 1968 which recommended the expulsion from the
party of Ncgobo, Letlaka, Molete, Mahomo, 'Molotsi, Raboroko, and Nyaose.
This was carried out but Leballo's new line and personal position were
undermined by Nyerere's 1969 Lusaka Manifesto, which recommended
outside intervention and a negotiated settlement in South Africa, and Leballo's
involvement with Tanzanian dissidents who tried unsuccessfully to recruit him
for a plot to overthrow Nyerere. Leballo informed the authorities of the plot
and most of the ring-leaders were arrested. However, the Tanzanians felt he
had delayed informing them for too long, as if he was weighing his options.
Thereafter, the liberation movements were no longer permitted easy access to
armouries and their movements were more closely monitored.
Leballo still hoped that a BCP election victory in Lesotho would enable the
PAC to operate more effectively but the British-mercenary backed coup of
January 1970, following the BCP election victory, imprisoned the BCP
leadership for three years and prevented them from taking office for a further
twenty. Leballo was the only African leader who spoke out against the BNP
regime at the OAU conference that year in Addis Ababa, where David Sibeko
made a determined effort to strangle the BNP leader, Leabua Jonathan Molapo,
as he made his way to the auditorium. Leballo's offer to train BCP supporters
as APLA troops was rejected by the acting BCP secretary-general, Godfrey
Kolisang, whom Leballo had tormented as a White man's stooge at Lovedale.'9
In 1974 the recently released BCP leadership launched an abortive coup. In
those places such as Mapoteng where members of the NEC personally led the
insurgents, there were instances of astonishing heroism, but vital players
absconded or turned themselves in. In addition, the BCP had no telephone or
radio communication, and when they captured weapons, they had little or no
knowledge of how to use them. The paramilitary crushed the rising with
considerable brutality but many of the NEC managed to escape, including
Mokhehle, Koenyama Chakela (secretary-general), Gauda Khausu (chairman),
Ntsukunyane Mphanya (assistant secretary-general) who had captured
Mapoteng with the only bullet his forces possessed, and Matooane Mapefane
(administrative secretary), a talented soccer player who had smuggled Philip
Kgosana out of South Africa. By 1974 both ANC and PAC had acute
recruitment problems. The ANC had been successful in dominating overseas
publicity during the PAC's debilitating leadership quarrels but, like the PAC,
was unable to attract volunteers easily from South Africa. Both PAC and ANC
offered to train the Basotho in order to bolster their own flagging military
program. There were reservations within the PAC about the problems of
training BCP either separately or as part of a mixed force. The BCP was not
noted for its ideology, and, although sympathetic to the PAC, it had a
parliamentary background and no reason to adopt the austere highly disciplined
role Leballo envisaged for it. Nevertheless the BCP accepted the offer to train
as APLA, masquerade as members of the PAC and only become Lesotho
Liberation Army personnel (LLA) when they returned to Lesotho.
Mphanya was the original choice for LLA commander, but withdrew
because of ill health. He was replaced by Khasu, the BCP party chairman who
had twice defeated Leabua Jonathan in national elections and had seen action
in 1974. Of the 187 Basotho who were eventually recruited for the LLA
184

venture, most were 'Russians', elderly anarchistic migrant miners from the
Rand, recruited by the Mokhehle brothers to ensure they would not pose a
threat to the BCP leadership. Younger, better-educated recruits were assembled
by Nowhere Liau, a colourful entrepreneur in Botswana but only about 50 of
the force were under the age of fifty. All were sent in groups from July 1974
onwards to Libya where the trainers did no screening and set about training the
nominated commander and his army together. The result was chaos. The
Basotho had not been briefed and many were frightened by the 'half-caste'
Libyans and the strange surroundings. Khasu's style of leadership was to
threaten poor performers with death and this so unnerved one miner that he
knifed Khasu on the third day of training. Khasu took two months to recover
and his place was effectively filled by Mapefane, who not only learned quickly
but also knew Arabic and used his knowledge firstly to interpret and then
instruct for the Libyans. By April 1975 the first group of recruits had mastered
basic skills and Khasu demanded to return to fight. He was opposed by a group
of five younger members of the LLA, in particular by Mapefane and Mafela, a
Soviet trained physicist whom Leballo had marked as a future commander. The
younger group's point was that it was absurd to believe they would cross into
Lesotho, engage the BNP regime and remain unmolested by Pretoria. They told
Khasu they needed further training as they would inevitably become involved
in the South African conflict. The row continued and was terminated by the
arrival of Leballo who gave Khasu a dressing down in front of the whole force
about the duties of a soldier. Training continued but at Leballo's departure the
quarrel resumed and when Mokhehle himself sent instructions for them to keep
training, Khasu refused and left the country. More recruits arrived including a
contingent of twenty-six from the South African Students Organisation and the
first group moved to Uganda for explosives training. Leballo was called in to
deal with another incident. Khasu had chosen an 'elite', who were already given
ranks, from a new group of recruits. The elite were allowed to beat the others.
Leballo restored order and then, at the request of the Libyan military and the
agreement of Ntantala, the APLA commander, appointed Mapefane as PAC
military attaché in the Middle East to instruct future recruits, including the next
batch of BCP, who numbered one hundred and twenty.
Leballo now attempted to bring closer links between the PAC and BCP
declaring that “the reality for the true liberation of Lesotho should be linked
with the total liberation of Azania.” Ntantala wanted to use the BCP's superior
organisational structure in the Transvaal and Welkom to raise funds and recruit
guerrillas but there was also a fear that a successful I.I,A attack in Lesotho
would undermine public confidence diplomat-reformist' PAC external
mission personnel were considerably less enthusiastic. Three meetings took
place between the leaders of both parties in Dar es Salaam but were wrecked
by the pompous behaviour of a BCP supporter, Dr Tsiu Selatile, the only
African member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who could have applied
his knowledge of the Comintern's workings, but chose to treat Ntantala, a
pragmatist, as an uncultured ignoramus
“who failed to define the quintessence of Panafricanism in general and the 1949
Programme of Action in particular ... (when considering) ... a merger between the two parties
of a united front (which) merited not general but specific connetization in relation to logical
premises.”20
 185

In August 1976 the LLA assembled at Chunya camp, Tanzania, but by

then the situation had changed dramatically. With the student unrest in South
Africa, the ANC and PAC were swamped with new recruits. Despite the
success of the joint PAC-BCP training venture, the external PAC
representatives were not competent to deal with the influx of their own
supporters sent north by Zephaniah Mothopeng. Five hundred were inducted
but many more turned to the ANC in frustration.
In 1975 Ntantala had restored PAC credibility and shocked the
ANC/SACP at the Maputo session of the OAU liberation committee by
listing the numbers of recruits sent north for training. ANC enquiries revealed
the true identity of these APLA soldiers and an attempt was made in
December 1976, when the ANC allied itself to the BCP secretary-general,
Chakela, to overthrow Mokhehle and bring the LLA into the ANC fold. The
coup failed but steps were then taken to upstage Leballo and marginalise
Mokhehle by dispatching Chakela to Lesotho for reconciliation talks to create
an alliance between the BNP regime and the ANC/SACP. Not only were the
ANC now anxious to destroy the LLA, but Ntantala himself changed his
position after the recruitment of the new APLA, deciding that continued
support for the LLA was no longer in the party's interest. He was also
justifiably suspicious of the intentions of younger members of the BCP
particularly Selatile and Mapefane, who were already acting independently of
the BCP NEC, and, in Selatile's case, feeling he was Mokhehle's chosen
successor as the party's chief intellectual.
The PAC camp at Chunya was at first organised by the LLA, until larger
numbers of APLA arrived from Libya. Ntantala was camp commander but
after 1976 he was challenged by the new recruits. His pre-1976 force was
about seventy in number and had used donated clothing and other funds to
attract local women and establish families around the camp. Other leaders,
particularly Sibeko and Make, were alcoholics. The young recruits objected
to the influence and power of this older group, who had lost the will to fight,
but were determined to maintain their dominance. Disturbances broke out and
Leballo was called in February 1977 to restore order. His austerity,
teetotalism and willingness to train with his troops gave him more respect
than other leaders. Ntantala, feeling his position deteriorating, unsuccessfully
attempted to get the support of Sibeko, now the powerful representative at the
United Nations in New York, for a coup against Leballo. The external
representatives were still a powerful force-Gqobose, Sibeko's successor as
treasurer, alone controlled more than 40 percent of the PAC budget while
Ntantala had access to Marxist-Leninist party donations from Scandinavia
and West Germany, and Sibeko siphoned off a donation from the Nigerian
army of $250,000. Little or none of this was filtering down to the new APLA
force. In November 1977 Ntantala launched an attack on the PAC
headquarters in Dar es Salaam to capture Leballo and occupy the offices.
Even though the target was over 800 km from Chunya, Mapefane's telephone
alert to Mafela, the new camp commander then in Dar es Salaam, came
barely before Ntantala's troops swept into the city. Mafela defended the party
offices with Soweto students and Leballo was not at home. The Tanzanians
confined the two groups but the story spread that the LLA was Leballo's
personal guard and was controlling the PAC. Selatile was boasting that the
LLA had 'put the PAC leadership on the throne', a reference to the new APLA
186

high command that replaced that of Ntantala. This writer, reporting to Leballo
and Mokhehle in Dar es Salaam in September 1977 on the feasibility of an
attack on military headquarters in Maseru, was seriously disturbed by
Selatile's meddling, in particular a request to spy on Mphanya, the acting
BCP secretary-general, and wrote to Mokhehle to 'exercise your leadership in
this matter', a suggestion the BCP leader ignored.
The new APLA command was chosen from the new recruits and in
December 1977 the PAC leadership met to discuss preparations for a
constitutional conference for the coming year, aware that Sobukwe was dying
of cancer. Ntantala still had support and when the new APLA demanded
punishment, six of his supporters in the central committee walked out.
Sobukwe died on 26 February and Ntantala increased agitation to oppose
Leballo taking over as leader. He was supported by Gqobose, who continued
to gather funds. The Swazis called in Leballo to deal with Ntantala's attempt
to establish himself as a local warlord. Leballo and Sibeko dealt with the
problem but the Swazis then introduced legislation to curb both ANC and
PAC activities.
By the time the PAC met between 28 June and 4 July 1978 in Arusha for
their most important conference since 1959, Leballo's position had been
weakened by his association with the LLA. He could rely on the young
APLA but was under enormous pressure from the ‘diplomat-reformist’ group
that now had American foreign policy to support them. The Carter
administration had determined that it needed South Africa as a stable element
in the equation to settle the Zimbabwe war. In this the Americans were
supported by the Tanzanians and other 'front line states', who advised the
ANC and PAC to tone down their militancy towards South Africa and adopt a
policy of detente and dialogue. Leballo refused, unwilling to see an American
solution to southern Africa, and earned the displeasure of Nyerere. His
position had been further weakened by the death of Mao Zedong and the
consequent switch from revolutionary fervour to American appeasement by
the new Chinese leadership. The ANC/SACP success in its drive to be
recognised as the 'authentic' liberation movement had closed many avenues-
in particular Mozambique and Vietnam-to the PAC, which was obliged to
consider extremely unsavoury venues for training such as Amin's Uganda,
Qaddafi's Libya, and Pol Pot's Kampuchea, and this had damaged the party's
international standing. Sibeko dominated the Arusha conference, using his
funds to secure a central committee supportive of his reformist attitude and
largely overcoming the young APLA's challenge for power. He was not
strong enough to oust Leballo but managed to deny him the post of president,
ostensibly in respect to the late Sobukwe, backing him for the new position of
chairman of the party. Leballo unsuccessfully opposed Ntantala's expulsion
from the party, pointing out that however corrupt he may have been, he had
used it to create a power base rather than squander funds and had established
networks of infiltration into South Africa. Along with Ntantala, the
conference expelled Gqobose and a hundred and one others, most of whom
were Ntantala's old APLA. The new APLA high command was confirmed
and, against Leballo's wishes, all funds were terminated to the LLA in
Chunya.
Mokhehle wrote to this writer after the conference,
 187

“(Leballo) has come out victorious but weak and nervous to assist us any further” and
appealed for financial assistance to transport the 178 LLA troops south.21

This writer sent a large Bedford van, which the over confident Selatile failed
to clear from Tanzanian customs, and then £5500, which enabled the
LLA to leave for Botswana by plane and rail. This convinced the
Basotho on the Rand that the venture was serious enough to back with
fund raising. Guerrilla warfare broke out in Lesotho on 15 March
1979.
Although the LLA had left, Leballo now found his movements
restricted. Uganda was closed to him since his quarrel with Amin's
henchmen over molestation of PAC girls. In October 1978 APLA's
weapons were commandeered by the Tanzanian People's Defence
Force (TPDF) for the war in Uganda. Nyerere requested PAC
condemnation of Uganda, but Leballo refused, suspecting the war was
a means to reinstate Obote in power. This refusal infuriated the
Tanzanians who looked more favourably towards Sibeko as a possible
replacement as PAC leader, an idea which he was finding increasingly
appealing. Leballo had the support of the army, Sibeko of the funds.
Burgess wrote:
Affluence and international contacts no longer satisfied the diplomatic group;
it moved to consolidate control over the PAC in the face of the rising threat posed
by APLA. 22

APLA, on its part, was incensed by 'the stories about lavish

parties, corruption and contacts with politically suspect figures
(Andrew Young) 23 which surrounded Sibeko. In late 1978 a
commission of enquiry, controlled by Sibeko, recommended a slowing
down of APLA infiltration south and Tanzanian troops increased
patrols around Chunya and removed APLA's weapons. In February
1979 a lively party of PAC bon viveurs in Dar es Salaam was gate
crashed by forty APLA soldiers who beat the revellers badly. The
Tanzanians demanded to have the culprits handed over and were
angered by Leballo's claim that they had left for the south. On 21
March twenty young PAC members who had refused military training
took Leballo hostage, believing Henry Isaacs' story that he had been
responsible for preventing them taking up West German scholarships.
Four members of an APLA rescue mission were killed in a car
accident and when Leballo was eventually released, his demand for his
captors to be shot was not implemented. It was becoming obvious that
he was no longer welcome in Tanzania and since he needed medical
treatment, the central committee decided to let him go to Britain and
to fill his place as chairman temporarily with a presidential council of
three members. As soon as he had left, it was announced he had resigned for
health reasons. Sibeko, Make and Ntloedibe formed the coup leadership.
The APLA troops opposed the coup on the grounds that the coup leaders
were corrupt, rather than unconstitutional, and refused to obey orders from
anyone but Leballo. Funds and money were terminated to the camp but the
finance officer, who supported APLA, allowed himself to waylaid and robbed
in Dar es Salaam after visiting the bank. Justin Nkonyane, the new APLA
188

commander, was arrested and detained for a day. Sibeko was recalled from
New York and held two stormy meetings with the APLA leaders, who
demanded more power and funds. That evening, after drinking heavily and
issuing threats concerning Leballo, Sibeko was shot dead by APLA when
trying to throw them out of his flat. The Tanzanians arrested eighteen
members of the APLA high command, held twelve of them until May 1980,
and put the rest on trial for murder. APLA was confined to Chunya where
they were joined by twenty more trained in Kampuchea. Enoch Zulu, who
had six weeks military training in Egypt, was appointed APLA commander
and on 11 March 1980 APLA was informed by a Tanzanian army officer that
Make was the new PAC leader. There was an immediate outcry and the
Tanzanians opened fire, killing eleven and wounding forty. The remainder
were split up and confined to camps in other parts of the country.24
In April, ten days after Zimbabwean independence, this writer arrived in
Harare and established a new headquarters for Leballo, who remained there
until 21 April 1981 gathering together remnants of APLA and negotiating
with ZANU(PF), North Korea and Libya for assistance. In addition he met
with Mapefane, who had been stripped of his LLA command by Mokhehle
and was seeking arms in Zimbabwe. Frustrated LLA troops, alerted to his
presence in Zimbabwe, began requesting him for assistance, since Mokhehle
had disappeared.25
At the end of the year John Pokela replaced Make as leader of the
Tanzanian-backed PAC and Leballo wrote to him suggesting a meeting to
resolve affairs. Pokela did not reply and was then physically attacked by APLA
troops, an incident the Tanzanians blamed on Leballo. Pokela merely gestured
to Leballo when they encountered each other as official guests at Rufaro
stadium in Harare on 18 April. On 20 April 1981 under pressure from
Tanzania, Leballo was arrested while waiting for a scheduled appointment with
Edison Zvobgo, minister of local government, held overnight and deported the
next day. He managed to reach Libya starving and penniless after being
shunted round the Middle East.26 His supporters were arrested and either
deported or kept in Chikurubi maximum security prison without charges until a
BBC broadcast by this writer from London secured their release. As Lodge
said 'the lack of dependable and generous patrons compelled the PAC to
choose weak and unreliable allies'. ...'27 Leballo left Libya after further
Tanzanian pressure and went to Ghana, where Jerry Rawlings used him for
work in the people's committees but was unable to feed him or pay him an
allowance. 28 In an act of considerable courage he used his remaining safe
diplomatic passport, from Liberia (his others were Tanzanian and Ugandan), to
fly to Rwanda and Nairobi where he met Nkonyane and others who had
escaped from restriction in Tanzania. He linked up with Museveni's Ugandan
resistance movement but the arms supplied to him by Libya through Rwanda
for APLA were taken by the Ugandans themselves.
Leballo eventually settled in London, living a life of extreme poverty,
dispatching what little money he had to his distressed APLA troops while he
lived off bread and tea, even giving up his famous pipe. His attempts to link
up with the LLA were rebuffed by the BCP, who had allied themselves with
Pretoria. Although his final years were plagued by acute lacks of funds, he
did manage to reunite the surviving members of the 1959 NEC,29 and in a
lengthy and complex plot finally tricked General Justin Lekhanya into
 189

breaking with the BNP regime and bringing back the exiled BCP. The tension
he endured, as the final stages unravelled and the South Africans took
unforeseen measures against the BNP, combined with influenza and high
blood pressure and he died suddenly twelve days before Lekhanya seized
power, using parts of the speech Leballo had sent him a year earlier. Lesotho
never became a significant player in the South African struggle as Leballo
had hoped, and was therefore ill-placed to deal with the question of the lost
lands that had dominated his childhood and shaped his political outlook."'
John Pokela's term as Tanzanian-appointed PAC leader was marked by
timidity, continued mutinies, defections to the ANC, and further
disintegration. Henry Isaacs, whose ingenuity seriously embarrassed Leballo,
resigned from his lucrative post at the UN as Sibeko's successor, denouncing
Pokela's leadership for corruption, mismanagement, and factionalism.
Benedict Sondlo, accused of grave corruption by APLA, was murdered by
them in Dar es Salaam and further unrest in the camps was curbed by
Tanzanian forces. Many APLA soldiers escaped to Kenya where their
position remained precarious." L. J. Selepe, who survived Chunya and then
left the PAC in 1985 in frustration with Pokela's inability to launch a guerrilla
struggle, wrote,
These problems resulted to a collective decision to eliminate all who stood in our way,
to go back and fight the racist regime. 32

Selepe joined the ANC and eventually became a member of the South
African Air Force. Ntantala was sacked as PAC representative in Zimbabwe
and over a hundred PAC members left the party, some joining the ANC.
Pokela died suddenly in Harare in June 1985 and was replaced by Johnson
Mlambo, whose only qualifications were that he had been well liked in jail
and hadn't indulged in faction fighting. Guerrilla activity resumed, mostly
directed against the security forces, but 1986 and 1987 saw fierce criticism of
the leadership, including accusations of criminal activity, including drug
smuggling. Moreover, the PAC leadership was unable to establish an identity
markedly different from the ANC. They were elitist and wanted reform,
paying lip-service to Izwe Lethu. They were not identified as being the
champions of the wretched and the APLA slogan of One settler, one bullet
was a mockery of the Maoist tradition and was unsupported by even the most
rudimentary elements of other policies. While Leballo's University of Azania
(his answer to Mao's Yan’an Red Army University) had been planned for
Zimbabwe," the new PAC training centre was sited in Sudan, ruled by a
deeply despised regime; and Gora Ebrahim, a leading external representative,
financed the party with donations from Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The brief
leadership of Mothopeng, who had aided Mokhehle in the launch of the BCP
and had been jailed for effective recruiting work for APLA, was not enough
to halt the PAC's deteriorating situation. In addition, the defection of Ntsu
Mokhehle to Pretoria and his apparently deliberate mismanagement of the
LLA ended hopes of establishing a significant APLA presence in Lesotho and
bringing the Basotho into a people's war. The nature of the party was also
changing, gaining support among the Cape Coloured community and
disaffected Muslim youth, perhaps giving that non-materialist dedication to
the struggle unsuccessfully sought by Lembede and Leballo. While the
vigorous campaigning of the new vice-president Patricia De Lille gave some
190

hope of returning the PAC to its traditional role of speaking for the most
oppressed strata of society, the vacillating conduct of Clarence Makwetu and
his inexperienced or discredited colleagues in the PAC NEC recalled the earlier
years when PAC leaders wished they had been bright enough to be lawyers or
doctors and lead the ANC. Despite De Lille and other activists, the PAC was
an almost irrelevant factor in the lead up to the 1994 elections, in which the
party was humiliated, gaining a derisory 1.2 percent of the vote. The Cape PAC
membership confessed that they were unable to vote for their own leadership
and preferred to support the ANC in an attempt to prevent the NP from taking
office. Moreover, the party was badly split over the issue of taking part in the
election, and a young militant group named the PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs
emerged opposing participation which they saw as a means of creating a new
multi-racial elite enjoying a first world life style at the expense of a vast
derelict third world underclass. Joseph Mbatha, a Year 10 student in 1994 and
a chairman of the Pan Africanist Student Organisation (PASO) as well as an
Azanian National Youth Unity (AZANYU) member, described the younger
generation's attitude to the Makwetu leadership's attitude to elections:
There was PAC Congress in 1993 at Umtata in eastern Cape. ... It was there where the
PAC started declining. The PASO, AZANYU and other members of PAC distanced
themselves for elections. I want to state this, there was split already in PAC because we
distanced ourselves as a Youth of Azania from the talks with the settlers regime. We called
ourselves as Revolutionary Watchdogs under the banner of PAC. ... When there was time to
vote for the PAC to participate in talks with the regime. The Congress became in disorder. The
Youth of PAC ran out of the Congress. We unite ourselves outside the Congress against the
captured leadership.34

Mbatha summarised the attitude of the PAC Revolutionary Watchdogs to

the Mandela election victory:

The ruling class has only adjusted by co-opting some of the oppressed. The genuine
aspirations of the African are not addressed.

It is significant that while American commentators on the PAC, such as

Gerhart, Burgess and Gibson (the last two of whom were his colleagues and
friends), have interpreted Leballo's career in context as the representative of a
new class emerging to challenge the established antiapartheid leadership,
White South African and British writers, such as Lodge and Bolnick (neither of
whom knew him) have been critical of Leballo's career to a near pathological
degree. These writers as well as rivals and sympathisers from South Africa
who knew Leballo, such as Halpern and Pogrund, never came to terms with the
class aspect of the PAC, and their perspective was obscured by the mental
restraints of their own background.

To Americans, leadership is extremely democratic and it matters little

where a person comes from, whereas in class and status obsessed British,
White South African and African professional circles, it is a matter of supreme
importance. Here for instance is Lodge's criteria for leadership:
He (Pokela) had strong credentials; he had taught with Robert Sobukwe and had played
a key role in the Poqo revolt 35
 191

While Pokela's 'key role' is questionable, since he was implicated in

faction murders which undermined operations,36 Lodge's analysis betrays the
general liberal White conception of what constitutes African leadership. The
accepted path for African leadership was through university education, trade
unionism, the chieftaincy or conventional military training. Leballo's
chieftainship seems never to be have been known by previous writers on the
PAC and it was not a path he ever considered for leadership, unlike other
minor, but overwhelmingly Catholic, Basotho chiefs who formed the
government and military hierarchy of independent Lesotho. In South Africa,
minor chieftaincy was associated with undemocratic rural conservatives,
usually acting as agents for the White government. Leballo's drive to take a
prominent place in the African political leadership of South Africa violated
political traditions. The ANC originally subscribed to the liberal Christian
Black Englishmen ideal, one that was upheld by leaders such as Lutuli and
Tambo. Mahatma Gandhi's involvement in South African politics and his
successful drive for Indian independence was also influential and
complemented the Christian ethic of non-violent protest. The ANC leader
Lutuli even adopted Indian Congress Party dress as the party's official uniform.
From the 1950s onwards, when the South African Communist Party (SACP)
played an increasing role in the party, the ANC leadership identified with the
Leninist concept of a hard core of professional revolutionaries directing the
masses without being answerable to them. All paths envisaged highly educated
leaders forsaking relative comfort, prosperity and social status to take up the
cause of the oppressed. Leballo himself never reached this status. After the
Second World War he qualified as a primary school teacher but was dismissed
from the teaching service for using violence during a political demonstration.
Whatever his character, he was not the sort of political leader associated with
high office. He himself recognised this problem and was willing to serve under
'acceptable' leaders who knew how to use his undeniably enormous talents.
Leballo deeply respected Mda and Sobukwe, even when the former abandoned
him in the 1970s, and told this writer in 1981 he was prepared to surrender the
leadership to Pokela if he could continue as APLA commander.
Commentators on the PAC single out Sobukwe as an inspirational leader
but it was Leballo, as Mokhehle testified, who created the PAC. Rivals
modelled themselves on Sobukwe, eager to emerge as the intellectual leader
acceptable in elite circles, but the PAC membership, like the BCP's, was drawn
more from the ‘probably never will have’s’ than the ‘not have enoughs’ of the
ANC and were willing to fight for a more equitable society than the elitists and
reformists. John Nyati Pokela was the sort of PAC leader acceptable to the
foreign mission personnel, the international community, the press and the PAC
elite to whom restoring good relations with Zambia was considered a notable
achievement, but whose political philosophy was a mean-spirited form of
mystical fascism with an paternalistic undemocratic attitude to those below
them on the socio-economic ladder. Stephen Plaatjie, a lecturer at Vista
University and a member of the PAC Vaal Executive, echoed the view in
June 1995 that PAC leadership was concomitant with being polite, African
and educated:
I don't share your views which suggest that the PAC declined after Potlako
K. Leballo's deposition in the late-1970s. All evidence ... strongly indicates the
revival of the PAC (was) mainly due to the efforts of Nyati Pokela who was
192

revered as a long standing veteran of the PAC and who was perceived to be
untainted in the internal struggles. ...38

Hezekiel Mothupi felt that elitism wasn't the only problem that prevented
the revival of the PAC as an effective force:
You will agree with me that since the death of PK, PAC has never had any leader of
Leballo's calibre, from 1979 we have had leaders, a collection of all types and kind of criminal
element, such as Vus Make and Sibeko, who killed our men at Chunya, then you (had) from
1980. ... drug peddlers and car smugglers under the leadership of Joe Mkwanazi and Johnson
Mlambo. None of these people knew the basic policies and programmes of the PAC ... that is
why the PAC lost its potential in exile.39

Until the 1979 Sibeko coup and the 1980 Chunya Massacre, it was
certainly not a foregone conclusion that the ANC would emerge as the
dominant African political movement in South Africa. The Leballo-Sibeko
1978 PAC leadership combining with the young APLA enabled both leaders
to engage in the separate spheres in which they respectively excelled-grass-
roots military-political expansion and the diplomatic circuit. But what could
have been drove Leballo to deep despair. On September 25, 1985, three and a
half months before his death, he wrote to this writer:
I have the most dynamic revolutionary ideas of strategy and tactics of a people's war to
wipe out the foreign illegal occupiers of our fatherland-Azania. ... It is a pity that one day I will
die without having fulfilled this ideological goal. ... Sometime if I don't write or reply to your
letters on time, please, don't blame me, sometimes I feel terribly a disappointed person.

If Sibeko had restrained his ambition and held on till Zimbabwean

independence, if the ZANLA commander Togongara had lived, if a PAC
people's war had operated out of Mozambique for the ten years Slovo wasted in
his ineffectual sabotage campaign, if Ntsu Mokhehle had not turned traitor,
there would have been a strong challenge to the progress towards the so-called
'miracle' of 1994 the more prosperous sections of South African society are
congratulating themselves upon now. The future of PAC is dependent on the
ANC-NP-IFP coalition's ability to satisfy electoral expectations and come to
terms with powerful forces that feel marginalised and embittered by the
accommodation with the NP. The PAC, particularly through De Lille's
parliamentary success in criticising the ANC's excesses and maladministration,
could ultimately provide a more radical alternative for disaffected voters. On
the other hand, the political discontent that the PAC Revolutionary
Watchdogs identify as the cause of escalating violent crime could see sections
of APLA grow into a variation of Peru's Shining Path movement. The fate of
the PAC depends upon whether or not electorally or revolutionary elements of
significance share the Watchdogs assertion that the Mandela government is an
ideologically bankrupt and ineffectual administration whose compromises have
enabled the White population to retain its power and wealth behind negligible
changes.
 193

REFERENCES

1. Burgess, Stephen, draft PhD thesis on the PAC, Leiden University, Netherlands, 1983. Burgess
and his colleague Michael Wilson, both Maoists, gave valuable assistance to the PAC in the
1970s and early-1980s, Burgess accomplished extremely interesting analytical and practical
work for the PAC before domestic circumstances intervened. He seemed set to present his
thesis in 1983 but apparently did not do so.
2. Patrick Duncan was a colonial officer in Basutoland and a close friend of Chief Leabua
Jonathan, helping him launch the Basotho National Party, and giving him newspaper publicity.
This writer was Acting BCP representative in Britain and Ireland from 1976-1977 before joining
the PAC, and financed many of the BCP leadership in exile until 1981 (including a trip for
Mphanya and Qhobela Molapo to lobby the African American caucus in the USA) as well as the
transfer of the LLA from Chunya to Botswana. He served on Mokhehle's orders for three months
in 1977 as a major in the Lesotho paramilitary.
3. The whole story was published by Bernard Leeman in Sesotho as Lesole la Mokhehle (Soldier
for Mokhehle), Roma, 1991. In December 1984 (sic), this writer met Duncan Campbell of the
New Statesman. Campbell was told that Leballo had a plan to bring down the BNP of Lesotho by
convincing General Lekhanya his career was finished for having been tricked into financing the
LLA against himself. Campbell was provided with all details because this writer felt that Leballo
had been denigrated for so long that it was time for an independent authority to vouch that a
seemingly unbelievable story was in fact true.
4. Mda's Hard Core and Inner Circle groups within the Africanist Movement, respectively
numbered about seventeen and fifteen. Mda, Leballo, Sobukwe, John Pokela and Victor Sifora
belonged to both groups who later provided seven members of the 1959 Pan Africanist
Congress (Hard Core: Sobukwe, Leballo and Fazzie; Inner Circle: Ngendane, Molotsi,
Mothopeng and Z. B. Molete) while Ntsu Mokhehle (Hard Core) led the BCP in Lesotho.
5. Joe Matthews worked for the SACP in Lesotho, in the 1960s using its funds against the BCP, a
diversion which cost the BCP the 1965 election.
6. Ngubane, Jordan, An African Explains Apartheid, Praeger, New York, 1963, p. 164.
7. Interview with Qhobela Molapo 1978
8. Letter to this writer 23 Nov 1978
10. Interview with Leballo 1983
11. Rand Daily Mail, 7 Aug 1962
12. Die Burger, 22 March 1963
13. Driver, C. J. Patrick Duncan South African and Pan African, Heinemann, London, 1980, p. 224
14. Gordon Winter's Inside BOSS-South Africa's Secret Police, Penguin, 1981, which incurred a
record number of writs for libel. Leballo insisted this writer should buy him a copy but, on
reading the first reference to himself, tossed it aside in contempt
15. P. K. Leballo correspondence with the British Home Office 1983-84 London. Leballo argued
that by taking away his British passport he had been rendered stateless, which was not permitted
under British nationality law.
16. Pogrond, Benjamin, Sobukwe and Apartheid, Rutgers University Press, 1991, p. 20
17. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC
18. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC
19. Interview with Leballo 1983. Kolisang denounced this writer in 1970 as a South African
Army Officer when approached with an offer of help.
20. Selatile letter to this writer 26 Aug 1980
21. Ntsu Mokhehle letter to this writer 20 July 1978
22. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC.
23. Burgess, draft PhD thesis on the PAC.
24. Forty-one letters to this writer from members of APLA in Kenya organizing the escape of
personnel from restriction in Tanzania 1984-1987
25. The BCP in Gaborone denounced Mapefane to the Zimbabwe police to prevent him re-entering
the country to search for an independent supply of arms for the LLA, and thus circumvent the
'commercialisation of the revolution' as he put it by the Mokhehle brothers, whose
mismanagement of the war included the maintenance of mistresses, heavy gambling in the
casino at Gaborone and the betrayal of critics to the South African Police. This writer, while
serving as a major in the Lesotho military on Ntsu Mokhehle's orders, was shown letters and
photographs by General Lekhanya sent by Shakhane Mokhehle, the BCP treasurer and now
194

a minister in the BCP government, reporting on the LLA. Mokhehle did nothing against his
brother when this matter was revealed. Shakhane's work against the LLA for Lekhanya and
the South African police not only led to the arrest of most of the LLA high command a[
Welkom but considerably undermined the BCP's bargaining power with Lekhanya after they
returned to Lesotho.
26. Letter from Leballo to this writer 26 Apr 1981 from Tripoli, Libya.
27. Lodge, Tom in Ian Liebenberg, Fiona Lortan, Bobby Nel, Gert van der Westhuizen (eds),
The Long March: The Story of the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa, Haum,
Pretoria, 1994, p. 121
28. Letters from Leballo 28 Dec 1982, 17 Mar 1983, from Accra, Ghana.
29. Letter from Leballo 16 Apr 1984 and information from A. B. Ncgobo 1984
30. Leeman, Lesole la Mokhehle (Soldier for Mokhehle), 1991. Campbell asked if he could write
an article on the true causes of the end of the BNP regime, but this writer declined, quoting
Richard Gibson's comment that it was too complex for outsiders to understand and too
frightening for those who did. Moreover, the world press equated the coup with South African
pressure, although the coup administration contained the Lesotho Communist Party leader, Dr
Sefali Malefane. Leballo's body was flown back to South Africa and then taken by road to
Lifelakoaneng for burial. Lekhanya prohibited any political demonstrations.
31. Letters to this writer 1984 - 1987
32. Letter to this writer 22 June 1995
33. University of Azania proposal to the Libyan Government, Harare, 1981. The Libyans were
prepared to launch the venture with an initial US$1.8 million, but this was interpreted as a
threat to the business interests of the Zimbabwe education minister, Dr Mutumbuka, whose
Zimbabwe Distance Education College had just been formed. Mutumbuka clashed with
ZANU(PF) secretary-general, Edgar Tekere, over the issue, which was shelved after Leballo
was expelled from Zimbabwe
34. Letter to this writer 15 June 1995
35. Lodge, Tom in The Long March: the story of the struggle for liberation in South Africa, 1994,
p. 121. Bolnick, Joel, 'Potlako Leballo-the Man Who Hurried to Meet his Destiny', Journal of
Modern African Studies, 29(3) 1991, pp. 413-442. Halpem, Jack, South Africa's Hostages:
Ba.sutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, Penguin, London, 1966, p. 27. Gerhart, Gail,
Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an ideology, University of California Press,
1978, p. 252. Barrell, Howard in Johnson, Shaun (ed.), South Africa: No Turning Back,
Macmillan, England, 1988, p 73.
Bolnick's Euro centred pseudo-psychological study of Leballo felt he 'constantly betrayed
the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the staggering human frailty of the modern leader' and speaks
of Leballo's 'psychopathy' which he equates with 'tell-tell signs of toquaciousness and the
psychic swagger.' Leaving aside Bolnick's judgment that politicians who talk a lot and have an
arrogant manner are mentally ill, other commentators on the PAC strongly condemned
Leballo. Halpern wrote of Leballo's 'personal instability', his love of 'exaggerated claims', and
Gerhart of his role as a 'poor substitute for Sobukwe' as leader (p. 252). Lodge described
Leballo ,as pretty disastrous for the PAC and its followers' (letter to this writer 21 May 1995),
while Barrell ignored Leballo's crucial intervention in establishing discipline in the joint
APLA-LLA force in Libya, describing his military work as 'rhetorical' and a 'posture' (p. 73).
Even Pogrund, a sympathetic observer, stated:
I always had difficulty in understanding him (Leballo): words came out of him
as a series of explosions of sound and much of it was rambling and
disconnected. An anti-white racism often seemed to be lurking just under the
surface, on occasion breaking into actual words (p. 67).

Leballo indubitably invented stories about his past but the extent has been widely exaggerated.
This writer, who worked closely with him for six years, initially found that Leballo did it as a
kind of smoke-screen because he believed that anyone knowing the truth would use it as a
weapon against him. Leballo's close friends and his own sons understood this trait and agreed
that it did not interfere with important work, but were aware that it could be wrongly interpreted
as some extreme form of psychosis. As this writer told Tom Lodge:
“P. K. Leballo was an extraordinary person from a horrendous society. In some ways you were
fortunate not to have endured what that society endured but as a result it has clouded your work
and I do not think you will ever be capable of understanding the effects on a people from a
derelict enslaved society of years of constant extreme stress. P. K. Leballo's life cannot be
 195

discussed fully by those who knew him best because he remainc a symbol that many academics
and politicians wish to destroy. If a fault is found it is identified as a major psychological failing.
I haven't read a balanced account of P. K. Leballo. He is too emotive an issue. Bolnick's article
sets the perverted White settler world as the standard and then sees how Leballo measures up to
it.” (Letter 2 Sep 1995).
(This writer acknowledges he has difficulty dealing with academics of his generation who chose
to work under the apartheid regime in preference to joining the guerrilla struggle).
36. Pokela was implicated in faction murders in Maseru after Leballo's departure. On his arrival on
Robben Island, the PAC branch resigned in protest, except for Dipheko 'China' Chiloana, who
did not know the story
37. This writer typed Leballo's letter to Pokela, suggesting a meeting. The letter did not make the
offer of stepping down in turn for command of APLA
38. Letter to this writer June 1995
39. Letter to this writer 8 July 1995