In the decades before the unbanning of political parties and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, the South African state waged a total onslaught against the liberation movements representing 'non-white' South Africans. After the Sharpville massacre in 1960, the apartheid regime banned and banished organisations and people with vicious impunity. Losing faith in peaceful protest, both the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) took up armed struggle, with the formation of the PAC's Poqo (Alone or Pure) in 1960 and the ANC's uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation) in 1961.
It is against this backdrop that Themba Linus Dlamini tells his harrowing story, Politics is a Dirty Game. After taking part in an act of sabotage as an MK operative in the early sixties, he went tinto exile. He was sent to the Soviet Union for counter-intelligence training and re-entered South Africa as a stowaway on an ocean liner. WHen the infamous Special Branch eventually caught up with him, he was tortured, tried, and sentenced to eighteen years of hard labour on Robben Island.
After his release in 1979, he remained committed to the liberation struggle, working for the South African Civic Organisation as well as risking his life to mobilise support for the ANC in the strifetorn province of Natal. Themba Dlamini's fascinating personal account — from his induction into MK to his final intergration into the South African National Defence Force ‚ is hugely inspirational and valuable testament of great courage in the face of brutal oppression.
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