Kenneth King and Meera Venkatachalam (eds), India’s Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa. Woodbridge and Rochester NY: James Currey (pb £25/US$36.95 – 978 1 84701 274 6). 2021, v + 219 pp.

Abstract

baffle students of South African radical politics. Lodge attempts to resolve – or at least provide the best-known information on – several historical controversies, such as the Comintern’s actual impact on the Party and Mandela’s membership. He offers a balanced and complex analysis of the Party’s oscillation between class-based struggle (with a focus on white workers) and its engagement in the national liberation movement (with an emphasis on cooperation with non-white nationalist organizations), also demonstrating how racialism sometimes played a role in the early Party. He delicately dissects the Party’s relations and influence within the ANC, brilliantly indicating that, despite the communist overrepresentation within the ANC’s upper echelons, South African communists should not be treated as a unified group, as ‘their personal loyalties and their political intentions were probably more complicated’ (p. 429). The SACP–ANC intimate alliance is detailed with the finest nuance. Yet I believe that here lies the main lacuna in this otherwise extremely impressive project. The alliance is exceptional, not least because it has endured for seven decades and virtually turned the SACP into an auxiliary force within the ANC. This alliance is well described by Lodge, but its exceptionality is not explained sufficiently. What brought the SACP to decide to virtually minimize its separate identity for so long – indeed, until the present day? Why is it so tightly and piously linked to the ANC, despite the latter’s changing forms and South Africa’s shifting realities? Were there, after 1950, other alternative routes the Party might have taken? It reads almost as if this tight ANC–SACP alliance was inevitable. Lodge explains well how, by the 1950s, the communists came to prefer anti-colonial nationalism over class struggle, but this ideological decision – as well as the camaraderie during the anti-apartheid struggle in exile – does not fully explain why relations with the ANC became so exceptional and so long-lasting, even long into the post-apartheid era. Nevertheless, Lodge has produced a historical masterpiece that presents the ultimate authoritative word on the history of communism in South Africa. The bookshelves of anyone interested in South African history or the global history of communism would not be complete without this work.