By the early 1930s Comintern’s wildly optimistic hopes of a South African revolution had long since evaporated. In 1930 Gumede’s Communist sympathies and autocratic leadership style led to his replacement as President of the ANC, which henceforth distanced itself from the CPSA. The CPSA, meanwhile, was in turmoil as a result of both the dictatorial demands of Moscow and its own internal divisions. In 1931 Comintern excommunicated the Party’s founders, Sidney P. Bunting and Bill Andrews, who were accused of Trotskyism and ‘white chauvinism’ (charges dismissed by Bunting in a letter to the Comintern secretariat as ‘your wild outburst of lies’). Their removal was quickly followed by the expulsion of the first black Africans to join the CPSA, T. W. Thibedi and Gana Makabeni, both accused of the absurdly named crime of ‘Buntingism’. In February 1935 a former Party secretary, Moses Kotane (who was later to become a long-serving general secretary), wrote despairingly to Moscow, pleading for help: ‘We are in a state of utter confusion. The Party is disintegrating and the work is practically at a standstill.’ Various attempts at reform followed and the CPGB was given ‘responsibility for giving constant help to the CPSA’. In February 1939, however, a report to the CPGB concluded that, ‘In practice the [South African] Party Centre has not been functioning for the past year’ and that Party membership was down to about 200. The vanguard Party of the African Revolution had almost ceased to exist - as indeed had its Comintern overseers in Moscow.
5
Ironically, Kenyatta’s Marxist past made more of an impression during the early years of the Cold War in Nairobi and London than in Moscow. There is no evidence that either the post-war Soviet Foreign Ministry or the KGB ever consulted the files of the defunct pre-war Comintern. The British colonial authorities were alarmed by Kenyatta’s record as a Communist or Communist sympathizer in interwar London and his secret trip to study in Moscow, but were unaware of the disillusion generated by his experiences at the KUTV. Kenya’s British governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, convinced himself that ‘With his Communist and anthropological training,
he knew his people
and was directly responsible [for Mau Mau]. Here was the African leader to darkness and death.’
6
Outside the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, which was so badly purged that it ceased to function during the Great Terror, African affairs received little attention in either the universities or the intelligence agencies of Stalin’s Russia. When Stalin received a letter of congratulation written in Amharic from the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, after Hitler’s forces had been halted outside Moscow late in 1941, he asked the Soviet Foreign Ministry for a translation - only to be told, reportedly, that Moscow’s only Amharic speaker had died in the defence of the capital. According to Vadim Kirpichenko (head of the FCD African Department from 1967 to 1970), this episode then ‘accurately reflected the state of African studies in the country’.
7
Things were little better after the Second World War. When Soviet policy-makers looked at Africa during the early Cold War, many of them saw what one Russian academic called ‘a blank sheet of paper’.
8
Khrushchev’s interest in Africa was much greater than Stalin’s. Though he knew little about the Dark Continent, he was favourably impressed by the fiery anti-imperialist rhetoric of the first generation of African post-colonial leaders. A few days before Ghana became the first black African colony to win independence in March 1957, Khrushchev declared enthusiastically, ‘The awakening of the peoples of Africa has begun.’ A Soviet correspondent at the first Conference of Independent States of Africa a year later reported with equal enthusiasm that ‘Africa has spoken for the first time in her history!’
9
The KGB, however, still paid little attention. Not until the summer of 1960, when Khrushchev decided to attend the next session of the United Nations to welcome the admission of sixteen newly independent African states, did the FCD - on instructions from Aleksandr Shelepin, the KGB Chairman - establish a department to specialize in sub-Saharan Africa.
10
As well as enjoying his own dozen lengthy speeches to the General Assembly in the autumn of 1960, Khrushchev must also have relished the passionate denunciations of Western imperialism by African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, who declared:
The flowing tide of African nationalism sweeps everything before it and constitutes a challenge to the colonial powers to make a just restitution for the years of injustice and crime committed against our continent . . . For years and years Africa has been the footstool of colonialism and imperialism, exploitation and degradation. From the north to the south, from the east to the west, her sons languished in the chains of slavery and humiliation, and Africa’s exploiters and self-appointed controllers of her destiny strode across our land with incredible inhumanity, without mercy, without shame, and without honour.
11
Though describing himself as an African socialist rather than a Marxist-Leninist, Nkrumah endorsed Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as the ‘highest stage of capitalism’, still intent on exploiting post-colonial Africa. He claimed Lenin’s authority for arguing that ‘neo-colonialism . . . can be more dangerous to our legitimate aspirations of freedom and economic independence than outright political control’:
[Neo-colonialism] acts covertly, manoeuvring men and governments, free of the stigma attached to political rule. It creates client states, independent in name but in point of fact pawns of the very colonial power which is supposed to have given them independence. This is one of [what Lenin called] the ‘diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but, in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence’.
12
KGB active measures in Africa promoted the same argument.
Some African Communists succeeded in rekindling the idealism of the revolutionary dream which had inspired the early Bolsheviks and captured the imagination of many on the European left in the 1930s. Nelson Mandela, who in 1952 became First Deputy President of the ANC, was one of many non-Communist militants in liberation movements who came to admire the commitment and self-sacrifice of some of his white Communist comrades. Early in his career Mandela’s belief that only ‘undiluted African nationalism’ could end racial oppression led him and some of his friends to break up Communist meetings by storming onto the stage, grabbing the microphone and tearing down Party banners. Gradually, he changed his mind. The Communist most admired by Mandela was an Afrikaner, Bram Fischer, grandson of a Judge-President of the Boer Orange Free State:
In many ways, Bram Fischer . . . made the greatest sacrifice of all. No matter what I suffered in my pursuit of freedom, I always took strength from the fact that I was fighting with and for my own people. Bram was a free man who fought against his own people to ensure the freedom of others.
At the treason trial which sentenced Mandela to life imprisonment in 1964, he told the court:
For many decades the Communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with and work with us. Because of this, there are many Africans who today tend to equate communism with freedom.
13
The feeble response of much of the West to the iniquities of the racist regime in Pretoria strengthened the illusion that the intolerant Soviet one-party state was a force for global liberation. In Africa, as in Europe, however, nothing was so destructive of Communist idealism as the conquest of power. Wherever they emerged, Marxist regimes, despite their rhetoric of national liberation, became oppressive one-party states.
The Centre’s Cold War operations in Africa fell into two main phases. The first, beginning in the early 1960s, was prompted by British and French decolonization; the second, starting in the mid- 1970s, followed the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa and the overthrow of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. The former French and British colonies failed to live up to Khrushchev’s expectations. Apart from Nkrumah, the only members of the first generation of African leaders to arouse the serious interest of the KGB were the Francophone Marxist dictators of Guinea and Mali, Ahmed Sékou Touré and Modibo Keïta. In all three cases, however, the Centre’s hopes were dashed. As well as creating one-party states, Nkrumah, Touré and Keïta wrecked their countries’ economies, leaving Moscow wondering whether to pour good money after bad to bail them out. The plentiful SIGINT generated by the KGB’s attack on vulnerable African cipher systems doubtless enabled the Centre to follow the calamitous mismanagement of the Nkrumah, Touré and Keïta regimes in depressing detail.
14
After these disappointments the Centre became increasingly cynical at the Marxist rhetoric of some African leaders, which was often prompted, it believed, not by any real interest in following the Soviet example but chiefly - and sometimes simply - by the hope of securing Soviet economic aid. Leonov noted in his diary on 6 December 1974:
The latest miracle of miracles has occurred. In far-away, impoverished Dahomey, in Cotonou, . . . President Kerekou has proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist as of 4 December this year, and his country as going along the path of construction of socialism. He is asking for our help in organizing an army, special [intelligence] services, not to mention the economy. Our ambassador, to whom he [Kerekou] set forth all this, broke into a sweat out of fear, and was incapable of answering either yes or no . . . This action of the Dahomeyans looks absurd . . . 80 per cent of the population of 3 million are illiterate, power is in the hands of a military clique. There is neither industry, nor parties, nor classes.
15
The end of Portuguese rule and the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1974, followed by the emergence of apparently committed Marxist regimes in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia, created a new wave of optimism in the Centre about its prospects in Africa. Moscow invested far greater hopes and resources in Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia than it had done in Ghana, Guinea and Mali a decade or more earlier. It also made much more extensive use of its allies, especially Cuba and East Germany, to defend the new Marxist regimes against their opponents than it had ever done before.
16
Castro, in particular, was a willing and at times enthusiastic ally. Some in the Centre later argued that Soviet involvement in Angola was largely the result of Cuban pressure.
17
Even when the Centre’s hopes were highest, however, African postings were unpopular with many, if not most, KGB officers. There were a number of embarrassing cases of alcoholism in African residencies.
18
The high hopes of the mid-1970s disintegrated over the next decade. In Angola and Mozambique, Moscow had to confront the intractable problems caused by a combination of civil war and economic mismanagement. Mengistu’s ‘Marxist’ regime in Ethiopia tried to justify the massacre of its opponents, real and imagined, by referring to Lenin’s use of Red Terror during the Russian Civil War. The most enduring Soviet-bloc legacy in many of the post-colonial states of sub-Saharan Africa was the help it provided in setting up brutal security services to shore up their one-party regimes.
19
It is only fair to add, however, that the self-styled Marxist and Marxist-Leninist regimes in Africa had no monopoly of economic mismanagement and brutality (though, in the latter category, none outdid Mengistu). Pro-Western leaders such as Joseph Désiré Mobutu in Zaire, Samuel Doe in Liberia and Hastings Banda in Malawi denounced the sins of their socialist neighbours but differed from them far less in any commitment to democratic values than in their willingness, often for their own personal profit, to allow Western firms to operate in their countries. The legendarily corrupt Mobutu, proprietor of Africa’s most notorious ‘vampire state’, received hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid, much of which disappeared into Swiss bank accounts, simply on the grounds of his committed anti-Communism. While Mobutu accumulated a personal fortune sometimes reckoned to be the size of the Zairean national debt, the inhabitants of a country with some of Africa’s finest natural resources became as impoverished as the citizens of Angola and Mozambique.
20
The only African country which arguably represented something of a KGB success story was South Africa. Though the African National Congress (ANC) was never at any point the Communist stooge which the apartheid regime liked to pretend, Soviet support, channelled through the KGB, helped sustain it in some of its darkest hours.
21
On paper, the rise to power of the ANC after the end of the Cold War appeared to fulfil many of the Centre’s earlier hopes. Joe Slovo, the South African Communist Party
22
(SACP) leader, was the most respected of the ANC’s white members and the man chiefly responsible for persuading Nelson Mandela to end the armed struggle. Many other ANC militants were also SACP members, among them Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki, however, quickly realized that Marxism-Leninism had nothing to offer post-apartheid South Africa. Since succeeding Nelson Mandela, he has co-opted able left-wingers into the government by offering them plum jobs, then entrusted them with Thatcherite reforms. The Centre could never have imagined that at the beginning of the twenty-first century leading South African Communists would find themselves in charge of privatizing state-owned industries, lowering trade barriers and refusing pay rises to public-sector unions.
23