On South(ern) Africa’s revolutionary families

Paul Landau's Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries is a remarkably detailed and innovative take on a key moment in South Africa's liberation history.The book immerses the reader in the social world of a group of anti-apartheid activists during the early 1960s, tracing how the thinking of Nelson Mandela and his ANC Youth League contemporaries -referred to here and in the text as "the revolutionaries"evolved from the mass shooting at Sharpeville in March 1960 through the mass arrests and Rivonia Trial of 1963-64.As Landau narrates, the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) emerged and evolved rapidly during this period as the revolutionaries sought to take the initiative against a state undermining peaceful protest to apartheid legislation through escalating and routinizing violence.In presenting this story, Spear challenges a dominant narrative that reads Mandela primarily in terms of his reconciliatory actions during South Africa's democratic transition in the 1990s, thereby eclipsing any serious engagement with his and his peers' efforts to overthrow the South African state and envision a new South Africa thirty years prior.Moreover, Landau deftly portrays the social networks that enabled these efforts -a diverse group of individuals linked by their political commitments and social ties in urban South Africa and who sought to make the future "without knowing its shape." 1 Here I wish to comment on one theme explored in Spear that relates closely to my own research.Landau does not merely trace the revolutionaries' political vision and social networks; he maintains, more specifically, that the revolutionaries resembled a family and that interpersonal relationships within this family and the politics that this family generated were intertwined.Consider, for example, this striking passage wherein Landau describes how the political and the personal were entangled for Mandela during the late 1950s, setting the stage for his and his peers responses to political events during the early 1960s: At this point, Mandela, kept under surveillance much of the time, began to emerge as a theorist and strategist, and through closed-door arguments and debates, he found a path through his difficult marriage and toward other personal relationships, attached to politics, to