Commanding disorder: rebellion and repression in apartheid South Africa

The three monographs reviewed here, by Jacob Dlamini, Daniel Douek and Hugh Macmillan, examine insurgency and counterinsurgency campaigns in apartheid South Africa. Taken collectively, they complicate conventional views on insurgent and counterinsurgent institutions by demonstrating their porosity, incoherence and frequent incompetence. Much has been written on the deliberate targeting, torturing and killing of insurgents, sell-outs and security forces. These monographs add to that literature, but also view victims of violence as products of error, personal animosities and unintended consequences. In addition, insurgents and counterinsurgents often spent as much time rooting out suspect elements in their own ranks as they did combating each other. Uncertainty as to who was friend or foe both widened the scope of violence and made it more unpredictable. African National Congress (ANC) and state operatives in the field could be struck down by coercive mechanisms emanating from within their own ranks. Furthermore, these authors make suggestive, if in Daniel Douek’s case overwrought, arguments that insurgents who were truly committed to revolutionary change seldom survived the liberation struggle. Those who did soon lost power to self-serving political bosses and unprincipled opportunists willing to compromise with the enemy. Thus, binary accounts of the tensions between the apartheid state and liberation movements are becoming increasingly superseded by more intricate formulations. Internal squabbles within both the structures of the apartheid state and revolutionary ranks enabled each side to siphon off information and operatives from the other. Some state agents and radical activists turned under compulsion; others embraced purported rivals willingly. Yet