A new documentary by the South African civil rights group AfriForum exposes uncomfortable truths about revolutionary Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), including the fact that much of the Soviet-backed party’s violence was directed at black people who refused to fall in line. The film, Tainted Heroes, also shows the unfathomable brutality employed by the ANC, its terrorist wing, and the South African Communist Party that controlled it behind the scenes in the effort to seize political and economic power over South Africa. Especially noteworthy is the ANC’s brutal war against black organizations and individuals viewed as rivals.
As the United Nations-supported and Soviet-directed chaos and horror was unfolding — mass-murder of dissident blacks, savage torture of political enemies, the deliberate targeting of innocent women and children, and more — establishment media organs in the United States and across the Western world concealed the truth. And so, much of the real history of the ANC and its bloody “struggle” has remained carefully hidden from the public to this day. But now, with the new film, and the emergence of the Internet, the untold history of the ANC is finally coming out.
That myths about the ANC persist even today is obvious — many ignorant and uninformed people have little to no knowledge of the group’s real history aside from bogus platitudes and mythology. For instance, the ANC and its revisionist allies around the world like to pretend that the organization was merely involved in a “freedom struggle” against the apartheid system and the former white-led government. Mandela is often inaccurately characterized as a “political prisoner” who was jailed merely for his belief in “democracy” and his peaceful opposition to apartheid, a system of government-enforced segregation that was already being dismantled even before whites voted to surrender power in 1992.
But the film shatters many of the ANC myths and lies. Some of the most shocking testimony in the film comes from black victims of the ANC, as well as from ANC operatives who participated in the atrocities against both white and black civilians. Others shown in the film describe the brutal and deliberate murder of their families — including young children — by the ANC’s terrorist wing. Indeed, one former ANC operative interviewed and shown in the film describes how the ANC made a conscious decision to target even the wives and children of South African farmers for extermination.
Many scenes of the film are difficult to watch. Especially horrifying, for example, are the graphic descriptions and images of a terror tactic pioneered by the ANC for use against their black political enemies. It became known as “necklacing.” Basically, if a black person was suspected of being loyal to the government or hostile to the ANC, the ANC cadres would fill a tire with gasoline, put it around the victim’s neck, and set it on fire. The death is perhaps among the most excruciatingly painful imaginable.
And yet, Mandela’s wife at the time, Winnie Mandela, promoted the barbaric form of execution — no trial needed — as a means of “liberating” South Africa. “Together, hand-in-hand with our sticks of matches, with our necklaces we shall liberate this country,” she declared. Many children were murdered through “necklacing,” merely for being suspected by the ANC of sympathizing with opponents of the ANC. Others were beaten or stoned to death. The overwhelming majority of ANC victims were civilians.
So violent were the ANC and Mandela, the leader of its terrorist wing known as Umkhonto we Sizwe, that the party and Mandela himself were added to the U.S. State Department terror list, only being removed less than a decade ago. While the film does not focus too much on Mandela, perhaps to avoid controversy, both the ANC and the South African Communist Party revealed after his death that he had lied all along. Not only was Mandela a member of the Communist Party, which he always denied, he was on its decision-making Central Committee, often referred to as the Politburo. An unpublished draft of Mandela’s autobiography released after his death also shows his full-blown support for violence, terrorism, and communism.
The film is just as relevant today, if not more so. It details how current South African President Jacob Zuma, who is pushing to steal land and wealth without compensation and openly sings genocidal songs advocating the slaughter of the embattled Afrikaner minority, joined the Communist Party in 1962. He then went to Moscow and was trained by the murderous Soviet KGB. Indeed, virtually every South African ANC leader since 1994 of any significance — from presidents to party bosses — has been a known member of the Communist Party with training and support from some of the world’s most murderous regimes.
Of course, the significance of this should be obvious, but communist atrocities and mass-murder have also been largely swept under the rug by the establishment, its propaganda organs, its “education” establishments, and its pseudo-historians. As numerous reliable sources have documented, though, estimates suggest the communist regimes that backed the South African communists murdered more than 100 million of their own people in the last century, not including those slaughtered in wars.
The film, unfortunately, likely due to time constraints, glosses over much of that horrifying history. But it does a great service by providing factual information about South Africa that is often lost amid the propaganda version of history pushed by the ANC and its allies. While never defending the government-enforced system of segregation known as apartheid, the documentary does offer context and balance that is almost entirely absent in history books that often falsely equate it with mass murder, slavery, Nazism, and other horrors.
Part of the idea behind separate development, for example, was an effort to mimic Europe, with sovereign, independent, self-governing homelands being created for the multitude of nations and peoples that call Southern Africa home. The film also explains how the policy came about, how it came to be discredited, and how the whole issue was weaponized and exploited by blood-thirsty and murderous communist revolutionaries to seize power using terror.
And so, the documentary spends much time explaining how the mass-murdering communist regimes ruling the Soviet Union, Vietnam, China, and other nations supported and guided the ANC and its totalitarian agenda. The film features numerous experts, participants, and others describing how South African terrorists were sent all over the world — from Southern Russia and Indochina to other communist-ruled nations across Africa — to indoctrinate them with Marxist “ideology” and train them to wage a campaign of mass murder and terror.
The documentary makers do an excellent job of showing how the communists worked in South Africa. Basically, a small core of communist revolutionaries in the South African Communist Party directed a vast army of people Lenin used to refer to as “useful idiots,” in this case the ANC masses secretly led by the Communist Party who were duped into helping to forge new chains for themselves under the Soviet-inspired guise of “liberation.” Despite the ostensible collapse of the Soviet regime, such tactics continue to be used today by communist revolutionaries around the world, making the film important for people everywhere to understand, not just in South Africa.
Of course, the ANC, which is right now in the process of driving South Africa into the ground, was not amused with the explosive documentary airing its bloody laundry. But rather than address any of the facts, ANC spokesman Zizi Kodwa was instead quoted viciously (and falsely) demonizing the people who produced the film with the party’s standard response to factual criticism. “They have failed in the past working with other sources to delegitimize the ANC. This is nothing else but propaganda,” he said. “They should be doing a film about how many of them in AfriForum have collaborated with apartheid. They are nothing else but hardcore racists.” AfriForum and its leadership have always been consistent against racism, of course.
The ANC spokesman also smeared fellow black people who appeared in the film and helped expose the ANC, its tactics, its history, and its totalitarian agenda. “Many of the voices in the film, like the IFP [Inkatha Freedom Party], were voices that collaborated,” Kodwa declared, smearing the Zulu party for collaborating with the apartheid-era authorities in a bid to defeat communist terrorism and prevent the enslavement of South Africa under a Soviet puppet regime like so many others in Africa. “The ANC remained the most prominent voice among the oppressed people. It enjoyed a lot of support.” Of course, as the film shows, the reality is not nearly so simple.
Ernst Roets, deputy CEO of AfriForum, was in the United States earlier this year showing the film across multiple cities. But rather than focusing on getting out the documentary to the masses, the organization is working on reaching opinion molders and other influencers in America and around the world with the truth about the ANC. “We decided to start in the U.S., since the U.S. is one of the major players in international politics,” Roets said. “Our approach is like that of a sniper, rather than shotgun tactics. Our goal is not necessarily to reach masses of people with the overseas viewings, but to reach those who have the greatest influence on world politics.”
Unfortunately, while the film hints at the issue, it does not spend as much time as it probably should have exposing the establishment and globalist forces in the Western world that backed the ANC even as it was massacring innocent whites and blacks in a brutal campaign of terror. As this magazine has been documenting for decades, South African communists had friends in high places, not just in Moscow, Beijing, Havana, and at UN headquarters in New York City, but in Washington, D.C., London, and beyond. Those forces proved crucial to the communist takeover of South Africa.
Especially important to helping the communist terrorist movement’s meteoric rise to power was help from organizations such as the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and its sister organs in other countries. Those forces also played a key role in sidelining black leaders opposed to communism and the ANC, including black leaders who were brought to America on speaking tours by The John Birch Society, which publishes this magazine, and other conservative and anti-communist organizations. This magazine extensively documented the facts at the time. But as far as the establishment was concerned, the black opponents of communism and the ANC did not even exist, despite often having far more legitimacy and support than the ANC within South Africa.
While communists and establishment globalists may have succeeded in keeping the facts concealed for a few decades, the truth is finally coming out. The documentary will undoubtedly play a valuable role in educating Americans, young South Africans, and people around the world about what really happened to that land. Recent developments in South Africa suggest strongly that the country is now on the verge of multifaceted catastrophe of immense proportions. The timing for this important film Tainted Heroes is fortuitous.
The reviewer, Alex Newman, moved to South Africa on his 18th birthday and developed a deep love and respect for its people while living there in 2004-2005. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. He can be reached at [email protected].
Related articles:
South African Communists’ Friends in High Places
Genocide and Communism Threaten South Africa
Original Mandela Autobiography Advocates Violence, Communism
South African Communist Party Admits Mandela’s Leadership Role
Warnings Grow Over Communism and Genocide in South Africa
What Americans Must Learn From South Africa’s Tragedy
South Africa Enters “Second Phase” of Communist Revolution
South African Regime Embraces Chinese Communism, New World Order
In Death, as in Life, Truth About Mandela Overlooked
