"The sooner we have a Vietnam, the better": Anti-Colonial War and the Women's Secretariat of the African National Congress, 1960-1980

In August 1968, Florence Mophosho, representative of the African National Congress (ANC), wrote to her friend and fellow activist Ray Simons, and compared the ANC unfavourably with the Vietnamese conflict, which Mophosho saw as a heroic anti-imperial war. Mophosho, at the time based in East Berlin with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, complained about the ANC’s slow progress in their efforts to overthrow the apartheid government. She bemoaned also its corresponding failure to gain worldwide legitimacy as part of a wider network of interlinked anti-colonial struggles. In her eyes, the ANC needed their own “Vietnam.”

            From 1960 to 1989, the ANC was based outside of South Africa, in exile. Throughout these years, the ANC deployed representatives to anti-imperial organizations and conferences, including the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the All Africa Women’s Conference, and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization. ANC women played a disproportionate role in this militant diplomacy, positioning the ANC as part of wider anti-colonial struggle, and relaying back to the ANC the political perspectives of these organizations. Through a reading of official reports, memoirs, and private correspondence, this paper will first highlight the ANC’s vision of itself as a part of a wider anti-imperial struggle, rather than merely an anti-apartheid group. Secondly, this paper will use the ANC as a window into these networks, and argue that women’s organizations in this period generated a specific conversation around war. Contrary to liberal anti-war women’s organizations, these groups emphasized the necessity of just war to establish true peace.