Anthea Jeffery Responds to Drew Forrest on People’s War

December 8th, 2009 by Claire

In response to Drew Forrest’s recent stinging attack on Anthea Jeffery’s People’s War, the author responds with a strong rebuttal:

Drew Forrest’s review of People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa (see here) is an unconvincing parody of my book. For Forrest seeks to explain away 540 pages of evidence about the ANC’s people’s war on the simplistic basis that my alleged ‘dizzy romance’ with Inkatha lies behind my supposed determination to ‘stretch the facts to fit my preconceptions’. [‘Polemic pretending to be history', Mail & Guardian 27 November 2009]
His review is also an extraordinary perversion of the truth, for he asserts that the ‘people’s war’ was ‘largely a figment’. He thus ignores:
the ANC’s visit to Vietnam in 1978 to learn the formula for people’s war;
its decision to adopt that formula, reflected in the ANC document The Green Book: Lessons from Vietnam;
the determination made clear in The Green Book that the ANC would now embark on ‘a protracted people’s war’ in which opponents would be overcome via ‘a combination of political and military action’; and
a host of subsequent ANC broadcasts and publications further exhorting people’s war and, in time, praising the achievements of this strategy.