Summary

It is commonly held that the ANC - after its banning in 1960 and the imprisonment of its leaders - largely disappeared off the face of South Africa until public support for it revived in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976. This book takes issue with that view. Drawing on substantial oral testimony, Raymond Suttner develops a convincing case that internally based activists, sometimes working independently of the ANC in exile and sometimes in combination, were able to reconstitute networks within South Africa after the organization's banning.