Paul S. Landau. Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2022. 412 pp. Maps. Notes. Sources. Index. $36.95. Paper. ISBN: 9780821424797.

In Spear, Landau tracks the rise of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), "Spear of the Nation," its struggle to respond to the apartheid state's ever-increasing repression, its armed resistance toward a Black nationalist, multiracial future for South Africa, and its eventual fragmentation and defeat at the hands of state violence, mass arrests, and torture.In doing so, he restricts himself to a narrative that confines itself, intentionally so, to the insurgency from 1960 through 1963, which unfolds inside South Africa.Spear is that rare scholarship of meticulous, thorough, and detailed evidence that requires enormous effort over much time: Landau's research spans twelve years (21) and hundreds of oral interviews from forty-nine collections at nineteen locations in five countries-and, with collaborative assistance, another seven archives ( 16).From these, he constructs a narrative that unfolds nearly month to month and offers insights into Mandela's deliberations in defining revolutionary struggle, his tireless efforts to organize MK, his guidance of its actions, and his witness to its demise-insights based on evidence that heretofore has not been widely available much less coherently gathered, contemplated, and marshalled for an understanding of MK and the victory in its defeat of liberation thirty years later.Spear is the defining study of Umkhonto we Sizwe: nothing else published to date matches it nor is any work likely to surpass it for the foreseeable future.In the early chapters, Landau begins with the Sharpeville Massacre (March 21, 1960) that provoked the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-African Congress (PAC) into decisive actions.In the wake of a thousand rounds fired in thirty seconds that left sixty-nine dead and hundreds more wounded while protesting the infamous pass-book registration of Blacks in South Africa, both the ANC and PAC, which had organized the protest, sought to mobilize the masses for an insurgency against the state.In a useful context, he offers an account of the past decade's events and Mandela's growth in leadership up to the Treason Trial (1956-61).In doing so, the reader comes to see Mandela's cofounding of the ANC Youth League in 1944 as both the forerunner of the ANC's development in the 1950s and the split from the ANC of the PAC in 1959, his difficult but determined decision to abandon fifty years of ANC nonviolent resistance in favor of necessary armed resistance, and the debates that unfolded among the ANC, the PAC and the SA Communist Party (SACP).What becomes abundantly clear is that Mandela would seek solidarity with and support for MK from anyone anywhere (Cuba, the Soviets, Mao's China among others, especially newly liberated African