Martin Thembisile Hani was born on 28 June 1942, the third surviving child of a semiliterate black Transkei trader. He topped the poll in elections for the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the African National Congress (ANC) in June 1991, putting him on course to become South Africa's head of state. Hani's political career was cut short by his assassination on 10 April 1993, and his death cleared the way for Thabo Mbeki — who he had edged out in the NEC election — to become South African president in 1999.

Hani's life, and the broader historical transformation that made his ascent possible, is the subject of Hugh Macmillan's biography, which appears in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, having first been published by Jacana in 2014. Like so many South African political icons, Hani was a product of the country's rural eastern Cape. He achieved a first-class pass in the senior certificate exams at Lovedale in 1958 and a pass degree in English and Latin from Fort Hare University College three years later. It was in those years that he took his first steps into political life: he was recruited into the ANC at Lovedale and joined an underground cell of the South African Communist Party (SACP) at Fort Hare. Hani was articled to a Cape Town law firm in 1962, the year that he joined the ANC's military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and his life path was irrevocably set in 1963 when he opted to go abroad for military training. It was then that he adopted the nom de guerre ‘Christopher Nkosana’ (he subsequently dropped the surname, becoming known thereafter as ‘Chris Hani’).

Chapters Two, Three, and Four discuss Hani's activities in exile during the sixties. The chapters draw on research that Macmillan conducted for his 2013 history of the ANC in Lusaka, and they represent the strongest sections of the book.Footnote ¹ Having received military training in the Soviet Union, Hani was deployed to Zambia in 1965, where he began reconnoitering infiltration routes to South Africa. He also participated in the Wankie Campaign two years later, in which MK troops fought alongside colleagues from the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) with the aim of establishing a ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ to South Africa. The guerrilla unit broke apart after being intercepted by Rhodesian security forces. Hani was arrested in Botswana after retreating to that country, and after receiving a remission of his sentence, he was repatriated to Lusaka in 1968. Macmillan offers an excellent discussion of the fallout from the memorandum that Hani and six colleagues wrote in late 1968 or early 1969, in which they condemned the hiatus in MK's military activity following the failure of the joint campaigns with ZAPU in Rhodesia. The signatories accused the ANC's External Mission of having abandoned the fight in South Africa and MK's commanders of having diverted their attention to ‘mysterious business enterprises’. The seven were expelled on 25 March 1969, but Macmillan cautions that the available documentary evidence offers no conclusive proof that the NEC tribunal also imposed the death penalty on the group, as some have contended.

Hani's reinstatement in June 1969 is discussed in Chapter Five. Macmillan notes that his return triggered an internal backlash from MK members from the Transvaal, who ranged themselves against what they claimed was the domination of the External Mission by Xhosa-speakers from the Cape Province. Hani considered leaving the ANC but opted to stay put, and his subsequent rehabilitation was rapid. He was elected to the NEC along with Thabo Mbeki in 1974 (they were both aged 32, becoming the body's youngest members), and his deployment to the front line in Lesotho in September 1974, which is considered in Chapter Six, saw his star rise further. During the 1980s Hani became MK's political commissar, in which capacity he operated across Southern Africa, including Angola, where the ANC's main military bases were located.

The book can be a little hagiographical at times. For example, when discussing the operations in Rhodesia, Macmillan quotes — without qualification or caveat — Hani's claim that ‘it was no accident that the Black Consciousness Movement was launched inside the country at the time. I believe it was inspired to some extent by the 1967 Wankie Campaign’ (46). Given that the campaign followed Steve Biko's famous walkout from the Grahamstown conference of the National Union of South African Students to initiate discussions about forming a new black student organisation, the influence would have had to have been retroactive.

Macmillan also writes that Hani's role in the aftermath of the Wankie Campaign ‘gave him a reputation for moral courage’ (49). One of the book's key contentions is that this reputation was richly deserved. Hani's activities during the 1980s are covered in Chapter Eight, and one of the issues discussed is the fallout from the mutinies that rocked MK's military camps in Angola in 1983–4. Macmillan argues that throughout the saga, Hani ‘continued to show moral courage in his campaigns within the ANC against executions, torture and . . . for the reform of Quatro’ (88–93). The references are to the opposition Hani expressed about the death sentences meted out to the leaders of the deadly mutiny in MK's Pango camp in 1984; the shock that he articulated about the conditions he found when visiting the Quatro detention camp in 1985; and the objections that he voiced in NEC meetings in 1985–7 about the excesses of the ANC's security department. But the picture is murkier, even on Macmillan's own telling. He notes, for example, that Hani travelled to Tanzania in 1989 to enforce the NEC's decree that former mutineers would not be allowed to sit on the ANC Regional Political Committee, to which they had been duly elected. Hani continued to refer to ex-detainees as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and issued public calls to ‘neutralise’ them — even after MK members had murdered his former bodyguard and ex-Quatro prisoner Sipho Phungulwa in Transkei in 1990 (90–1). And the book's telling of the controversy is far from complete. Macmillan expresses a degree of surprise that, despite Hani's campaigning, ‘some critics’ have viewed the mutinies in Angola as ‘his weakest link’. He might have noted that former detainees were Hani's strongest critics, and he could have probed the substance of their criticisms.Footnote ²

Chapter Eight, the book's penultimate chapter, deals with the years of transition in South Africa in the early 1990s. Macmillan notes that there is little basis for the claims made by some that Hani and other SACP leaders lacked commitment to negotiations and continued to push for a revolutionary seizure of power (115). This is not to say that Hani's determination to secure a revolutionary transformation of South African society was in any degree diminished. The final chapter, ‘Visions of a New South Africa’, deals with Hani's political aspirations for the postapartheid era. His hopes for a new South Africa had always been guided by the Soviet model, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe occasioned deep soul-searching by him and other members of the SACP, which features in the chapter. Macmillan notes that towards the end of his life, Hani conceded that the SACP might have been naïve and myopic in failing to discern the totalitarian aspects of the Soviet system, but that he continued to believe that the atrocities committed in the name of socialism did not discredit its basic principles (120). Having become SACP general secretary in 1991, Hani committed himself to fight for those ideals: he set himself the aim of developing the SACP as an autonomous party that would partner with the ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) after apartheid, with the aim of achieving a ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (NDR) on behalf of the workers and the poor (121).

Macmillan also speculates on the impact that Hani might have had in the postapartheid era. He concludes that ‘the answer to such counter-factual questions is, of course, that we don't know and we can't know’ (122). But we can hazard a guess. After all, Hani's disciples in the SACP have committed themselves to operationalising his ideas, and their efforts at establishing the party as an independent-minded member of the Tripartite Alliance in pursuit of the NDR have not been devoid of success. By 2021, the process has reached the stage of amending the South African constitution to permit the expropriation of all assets (not just agricultural land) without compensation. A one-page Postscript by Macmillan deals with the efforts of Hani's assassin, Janusz Waluś, to gain parole. The absence of an epilogue dealing with the continuing consequences of Hani's ideas and their role in the postapartheid denouement is felt. The discussion of Hani's political legacy would have been strengthened by it.