Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)
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Item Ensemble study and struggle: A history of the Yu Chi Chan Club and the National Liberation Front(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Gamedze, Asher Simiso; Nieftagodien, NoorThis dissertation is a history of the relationship between study and struggle in the lives and afterlives of two formations that were part of the South African and Namibian national liberation struggles – the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) – which were founded in the early 1960s in the turn to armed struggle. The YCCC was a study group on guerrilla warfare with a commitment to fighting for socialist democracy and the NLF, founded by the YCCC, was an underground network of cells of guerrillas, a series of overlapping ensembles that sought to unite the various armed forces of the liberation movement. Their personnel, modes of analysis, orientations, tendencies and strategies were present in the earlier and subsequent decades of struggle, finding expression in a wide range of political and intellectual forms –united fronts, underground study groups, education projects, publications, and independent political actions. The project’s scope extends from the late 1950s until the late 1980s, and explores various responses to the changing conditions of apartheid and capitalism in South Africa and Namibia. This radical trajectory of study and struggle was formed outside of a single or stable political home and it evolved through continual experimentation and collaboration with other political organisations. While some of these experiments, and the individuals that constituted them, have been written about in isolated ways, a longer trajectory of these formations that attempts to understand its development over time, has not, up until this point, been written. To research this topic, the dissertation’s process has undertaken semi-structured interviews and done archival work in both officially constituted collections, and personal and private collections of individuals and families who were participant in the history. The work makes an original contribution to the existing literature in three ways. Firstly, by writing this history – the longer tradition of the YCCC/NLF’s study and struggle – for the first time. Secondly, by illuminating their alternative perspectives and alternative approaches within major conjunctures in the liberation struggle, it contests the often-assumed inevitability of the political dispensation of the present moment which is based on a teleological account of the liberation struggle. Thirdly, the dissertation elaborates and develops, as organisational form and a method of historical research, the concept of ensemble. Bands in the black creative music tradition are taken as the paradigmatic expression of ensemble and this is transposed to consider the evolution of the minoritarian tradition of the YCCC/NLF over time. This opens up an affinity for narrative 3 | P a g e and the contradictions that emerge in the course of struggle, understanding the process, and an attentiveness to it, as important in the experimentation with and elaboration of an alternative approach to writing and thinking about history that is informed by the need for ongoing struggle. The dissertation argues that the significance of the history of the YCCC and the NLF cannot be understood only within the moment of their existence and instead needs to be considered in relation to the longer trajectory of their political ideas and practices.