At a Glance
Durban, the Jewish Community, and the Communist Left
Ronnie Kasrils grew up in Durban in the 1940s and 1950s, in the Jewish community of Natal that was positioned in the apartheid racial hierarchy as white but that carried, for many of its members, a political inheritance from the Eastern European Jewish immigrant experience that made the comfortable accommodation with racial privilege difficult to maintain. The Jewish community's representation in the South African communist movement was disproportionate to its numbers — not because all Jewish South Africans were communists, most were not, but because the political traditions of the Pale of Settlement and the experience of anti-Semitism had given many young Jewish South Africans a particular sensitivity to what racial categorisation did to human beings.
The Durban of Kasrils's youth was also the city of the Indian community's political tradition — of the Natal Indian Congress, of the passive resistance campaigns, of figures like Monty Naicker and Yusuf Dadoo who had built the Indian Congress into one of the most sophisticated political organisations in South Africa. The intersection of the Jewish communist tradition and the Indian Congress tradition in Durban produced a specific political culture that shaped Kasrils's formation in ways that were particular to that city and that time.
He joined the Communist Party and uMkhonto we Sizwe in the early 1960s — at the moment when the formation of MK was bringing together the ANC, the SACP, and the Congress Alliance's most militant members in the decision for armed struggle that followed Sharpeville. His involvement from the beginning placed him in the founding generation of MK, the people who shaped the organisation's culture and methods before it had developed the institutional forms that subsequent generations would inherit.
The Underground Years: Intelligence Work as Liberation
Kasrils left South Africa in 1963, following the path of many MK cadres who went into exile after the Rivonia arrests made continued clandestine activity inside South Africa extremely dangerous. He went to London, then to the Soviet Union for military and intelligence training, and began the long career in MK's military intelligence apparatus that would eventually make him one of the most operationally significant figures in the liberation movement's armed wing.
Military intelligence work in the liberation movement context meant managing multiple functions simultaneously: collecting information about the apartheid security apparatus's operations, maintaining counter-intelligence against the state's penetration attempts, developing and protecting the human sources whose information kept MK's operations informed, and managing the relationships with allied intelligence services that gave MK access to capabilities and information it could not develop entirely independently. The Soviet KGB, the East German Stasi, the Cuban DGI, and the intelligence services of sympathetic African states were the principal allied services, each providing different things and requiring different management.
Kasrils brought to this work the combination of analytical intelligence, operational flexibility, and ideological commitment that the role required. He was not merely a technical intelligence professional; he was a politically committed communist whose intelligence work was in the service of a political project he believed in, and this combination gave his work a character that distinguished it from purely professional intelligence activity. The memoir he eventually wrote — Armed and Dangerous — is the best available personal account of what MK's intelligence operations actually looked like from the inside, and it is a remarkable document precisely because it was written by someone who understood both the political and the operational dimensions of what he was describing.
Operation Vula and the Intelligence Dimension
Operation Vula — the ANC's clandestine operation to rebuild a functional underground inside South Africa, commanded by Mac Maharaj from inside the country — had an intelligence dimension that was Kasrils's particular area of contribution. The operation required not only the clandestine entry and the encrypted communications that made it operationally possible, but the intelligence support from outside South Africa that maintained its connections to the ANC's external mission and that managed the security precautions that kept it from being discovered by the apartheid security apparatus as long as it was.
The intelligence support for Vula required maintaining the counter-intelligence measures that prevented the operation from being penetrated — identifying and neutralising the informants and the surveillance operations that the security apparatus directed at the ANC's exile structures, managing the operational security of the communication channels that connected the Vula network inside South Africa with the ANC's command in Lusaka, and maintaining the analytical picture of what the apartheid security apparatus was doing and how close it was to discovering the operation.
When Vula was blown in July 1990, the intelligence failure that allowed its exposure was a reminder that no intelligence operation is permanent and that the security apparatus's determination and resources would eventually find what they were looking for. But Vula had maintained operational security for two years — long enough to demonstrate the ANC's capacity and to serve the political purpose that Oliver Tambo had designed it to serve.
The Ministerial Arc: From MK to Government
Ronnie Kasrils's post-apartheid ministerial career traced one of the more complete reversals in South African political history. The man who had spent twenty-seven years outside South Africa working for the intelligence apparatus of the liberation movement against the apartheid state's security services became, in succession, the Deputy Minister of Defence overseeing the integration of the former apartheid military and MK, the Minister of Water Affairs overseeing the extension of water services to communities that apartheid had denied them, and finally the Minister of Intelligence Services — the political head of the post-apartheid intelligence services that were the institutional successors to the organisations he had spent his career opposing.
The Defence portfolio gave him the opportunity to apply his military intelligence experience to one of the most institutionally complex challenges of the transition: integrating the South African National Defence Force from the former apartheid South African Defence Force and the various armed wings of the liberation movement — MK, the Azanian People's Liberation Army, and the homeland defence forces. The integration was not a simple administrative exercise; it was a process of merging organisations with radically different cultures, loyalties, and self-understandings into a single institution that would be the defence force of the democratic South Africa.
The Intelligence Services portfolio, which he held from 2004 to 2008, was in some respects the most personally complex of his ministerial positions. The post-apartheid intelligence services — the National Intelligence Agency and the South African Secret Service — were the institutional successors to the National Intelligence Service and the Security Branch that had spent the apartheid era trying to destroy the liberation movement that Kasrils had been part of. Managing these institutions, ensuring their accountability to democratic oversight, and building the culture of legitimate intelligence work in a democracy from the ruins of a security apparatus that had specialised in torture and murder: these were challenges that required both institutional knowledge and political judgment.
The Critical Voice: When Loyalty to the Struggle Means Speaking Against the Party
In his later years Ronnie Kasrils became increasingly willing to speak publicly about what he saw as the ANC government's failures — its corruption, its drift from the liberation movement's economic commitments, the growing inequality of post-apartheid South Africa, the ANC's accommodation with the very structures of racial capitalism that the liberation movement had claimed to be dismantling. His criticisms were not the criticisms of someone who had never been part of the movement or who had always stood outside it; they were the criticisms of someone with impeccable liberation movement credentials, who had spent twenty-seven years in the underground and in exile working for the liberation of South Africa, and who was now arguing that the liberation had been incomplete and that the movement he had been part of was failing its commitments.
This kind of internal criticism — loyalty to the liberation struggle's values expressed as criticism of the liberation movement's governing party — is one of the more difficult political positions to maintain, because it requires drawing a distinction between the movement and its values that the movement's institutional culture tends to resist. Kasrils drew that distinction and maintained it, accepting the criticism that such positions attract from within the ANC while insisting that the values of the liberation struggle were more important than loyalty to any party.
Legacy: The Underground Fighter and His Later Honesty
Ronnie Kasrils's legacy has two main dimensions. The first is the twenty-seven years of underground and exile work that made him one of the most operationally significant figures in MK's intelligence apparatus and that contributed directly to the liberation movement's capacity to maintain the military and intelligence pressure that eventually helped force the democratic transition. This was consequential work, done at real personal cost and maintained through decades of exile from the country he was working to liberate.
The second is the later critical voice — the willingness to speak publicly about the ANC government's failures from the position of someone who could not be accused of never having been committed to the liberation struggle. This dimension of his legacy is more contested, because it involves arguments about the post-apartheid South Africa that remain unresolved and about which the ANC and its critics disagree fundamentally. But the courage it represents — to break with institutional loyalty in the name of political values — is consistent with the courage that the underground work required, and it is the kind of honesty that democratic politics needs from the people who make it.