Dr. Landau is professor of history. His publications include: “The M-Plan: Mandela’s Struggle to Reorient the African National Congress.” Journal of Southern African Studies (2019); Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1948 (2010); and Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (co-edited, 2002).
Dr. Landau’s presentation “Operation Mayibuye and the Limits of the Political Imagination” drew primarily from his recently published book of the same name. In his lecture, he argued that the trajectory of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) campaign was to create structures on the ground for guerilla attacks that would lead to mass participation. This would ultimately accelerate people into an insurgency that involved the public and would lead to the end of apartheid. The plans for this campaign were sketched out in a document called “Operation Mayibuye.” This was led by the MK or “Spear of the Nation,” an organization closely connected to the ANC. Dr. Landau went on to state that Mandela founded MK originally as a compromise, as he was not permitted to lead the entirety of the ANC in a confrontational capacity. Mandela helped supervise the reorganization of the ANC, creating a structure in which people could take orders in secret. In the 1950s, African nationalists inside the ANC developed their own adjunct branches. Eventually the ANC split in 1959 and was banned by the South African government altogether in 1960. During this time, many members joined the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).
Dr. Landau explained that Mandela then left South Africa to raise money in emerging African countries and represented MK as “the front edge” of the ANC. During his travels, Mandela portrayed the ANC as a liberation movement, despite not receiving permission to say this. Eventually, he created a core of people in Johannesburg, the Eastern Cape, and Natal that “took care of revolutionary mobilization.” Many people were sent out of the country to receive special training in East Germany or the Soviet Union. These newly trained leaders were expected to return having learned military techniques that could be used in arms struggle. After Mandela’s capture, members of his core group, made up of members from the Communist Party and ANC, continued the operation. These leaders met to create a document calling for the special training of hundreds of men who would be placed across South Africa. It was thought that through sudden guerilla activity they would “throw fuel over” already-existing violence. Dr. Landau ended his lecture by emphasizing that Operation Mayibuye was an organized mass mobilization effort that helped pave the way for the end of apartheid in South Africa.