Spear

“For those content to see Mandela as nothing more than everyone’s favorite grandpa, this book will make for uncomfortable reading; for those who want to appreciate Mandela in the fullness of his life and of the choices he made with that complex and remarkable life, this humdinger of a book will help them see Mandela in a new and more illuminating light.”

“Landau is rightly incensed with the elite nationalism of the ANC and hints at how its fault lines can be traced back to the sectarian pressure groups within the 1960s struggle movement. The ANC hardly has ‘a good story to tell,’ but something truly fresh, even sympathetic, emerges when the story of the struggle for liberation is not homogenized around their triumphalist mono-narrative tropes. Landau’s book leads the pack here.” ~Mail and Guardian

“This retelling of the story of Nelson Mandela’s armed rebellion between 1960 and 1964 is a fresh and exciting reinterpretation of a narrative that too often is told with the distorting effects of hindsight. Paul Landau has drawn upon conversations with a literal army of informed participants, 250 people from the movement that Mandela helped to make, its commanders, its foot-soldiers, and its camp-followers. He has also reread and reinterpreted the compendious archival record. Emerging from this research is a very different Mandela from the kindly patriarch who wrote his memoirs thirty years after these events: radical, tough-minded, and calculating. This is the story of what Nelson Mandela at the time of the rebellion was seeking to achieve, what he was thinking, and what he actually did, day by day. Most importantly, Landau offers new and persuasive explanations for the considerations that shaped Mandela’s decision-making. Spear is an astonishing breakthrough achievement.”

“Paul Landau offers us an outstanding book on Umkhonto we Sizwe, with the figure of Nelson Mandela at the centre of the story. He pays close attention to affective relationships among protagonists, all too rare among male scholars. The book connects biography to strategic political thinking in interesting new ways. Written in Landau’s trademark lucid and engaging style, the study is critical even while appreciative of the heroic ambitions of his subject. This gripping read is a meticulous and pathbreaking contribution to scholarship on revolutionary movements as well as to South African historiography.”

“Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries is one of the most important books on South Africa to appear in more than a generation. A masterpiece of analysis and careful historical reconstruction, Landau revisits a crucial moment in the country’s modern history, when a group of activists turned revolutionaries led by Nelson Mandela pursued the overthrow of the racist apartheid state. Concentrating on the early 1960s at the very moment South Africa was becoming an authoritarian order, Landau brilliantly reconstructs the world within which Mandela and others around him committed themselves to revolutionary violence—what they read, the debates that unfolded and, crucially, how they understood South Africa in the wider world. Based on unparalleled research, including an extraordinary array of interviews, Spear takes on a range of controversial subjects: the decision to use violence, the fractious struggles within the ANC’s leadership, and Nelson Mandela himself. Empathic and iconoclastic, Landau’s discoveries may unsettle some readers, but no one will be able to look at the early 1960s the way they used to, as well as the ANC’s three decade-old grip on South Africa. This timely and learned book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in South Africa, political violence, and the end of colonialism."

“Just when some were starting to think that there was nothing new to say about Nelson Mandela, Paul Landau comes along to show us just how much there is still to say about one of the most consequential figures of the twentieth century. Landau chooses violence, that most discomfiting subject for those content to pretend that Mandela never picked up a gun, to show us how much we still have to learn about Mandela and his colleagues. As Landau points out, commentators tend to treat South Africa’s turn to armed struggle in December 1961 as an act of desperation, an unfortunate, embarrassing decision by a group of well-meaning but reluctant revolutionaries. Landau successfully challenges that glib treatment in this superb and magisterial account of the history of revolutionary violence in South Africa. "Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries draws on a range of sources—from interviews, memoirs, official archives, to Mandela’s bookshelf—to show how these supposedly reluctant revolutionaries arrived at their fateful decision. Rather than treat the use of violence against apartheid as a failure of moral resolve on the part of leaders such as Mandela, Landau offers the reader an insightful intellectual history of the relationship between these leaders and violence. As Landau shows so well in this tour de force of a book, Mandela and his comrades did not choose violence in a void; they were looking at developments in other parts of the world, from Latin America and North Africa to Asia. For those content to see Mandela as nothing more than everyone’s favorite grandpa, this book will make for uncomfortable reading; for those who want to appreciate Mandela in the fullness of his life and of the choices he made with that complex and remarkable life, this humdinger of a book will help them see Mandela in a new and more illuminating light.”