of the settler-controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland at the end of 1963, they could only pass clandestinely through Northern Rhodesia with the help of the local nationalist parties. Many future leaders of the South African ANC, who feature in this book, including Johnny Makatini, who became head of international affairs, Archie Sibeko, prominent in MK and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), Zola Skweyiya, later a lawyer and a member of the ANC constitution committee, and Chris Hani, a hero of the Wankie campaign and later chief of staff of MK, passed this way, but they were unable to stay long in Northern Rhodesia. Some, like Thabo Mbeki in 1962, were turned back before they could enter Northern Rhodesia and went on by air from Bechuanaland to Tanganyika. Other less fortunate people, including Joe Gqabi and Henry ‘Squire’ Makgothi, reached Northern Rhodesia, but were sent back to South Africa, where they served long prison terms. The links between the ANC and Northern Rhodesia/Zambia went back to its establishment as the South African Native National Congress in 1912. The new congress was then seen as a regional organisation and its honorary presidents included several paramount chiefs, or kings, from outside the boundaries of South Africa. Among them was one from north of the Zambezi, King Lewanika, the still quasi-independent ruler of Barotseland. One of his younger sons, Godwin Mbikusita Lewanika, was the first president of Northern Rhodesia’s African National Congress when it was set up in 1948. The ANC’s president, Chief Albert Luthuli, corresponded with Northern Rhodesia’s ANC in 1956–7, but the two congresses were soon preoccupied by their own internal dissensions, which resulted in the splitting away from the South African ANC of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) under the leadership of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, and from the Northern Rhodesian ANC of the Zambia ANC (ZANC) under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda. After its banning by the colonial government in 1959, the latter party re-emerged as the United National Independence Party (UNIP, pronounced ‘you nip’), which was to lead Northern Rhodesia through the break-up of the Federation at the end of 1963 to independence as Zambia in October 1964. Nelson Mandela, the underground commander of MK, which had been set up as an autonomous organisation by the ANC and the SACP in July 1961 and had launched a sabotage campaign on 16 December, left South Africa clandestinely through Bechuanaland in January 1962 to attend the meeting of the Pan African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa (known as PAFMECSA) in Addis Ababa. It was an important part of his mission to seek funds and military training facilities for MK recruits in independent Africa. In Tanganyika on the way, and at the meeting in Ethiopia, he had his first encounters with the two leaders who were to be the ANC’s most important hosts over the next 30 years. He found that Julius Nyerere, the leader of TANU (the Tanganyika African National Union) and 14
The Lusaka Years
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