2024/12/09 by Emma Lundin · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #South African History and Culture #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/01436597.2024.2432496
openalex publication_date 2024/12/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This article contributes to ongoing debates about the impact of exile on the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC). In particular, it explores the lives of the small group of ANC members who were in exile in Sweden from the early 1960s until 1994. Inspired by Dorothy E. Smith’s work on institutional ethnography, it aims to recreate the working practices and experiences of those who worked in or around the ANC office in Stockholm using interviews, auto/biographical and organisational sources. In doing so, the article examines the role that the ANC in Sweden played in transnational anti-apartheid activism and solidarity politics, and the specificities that allowed this small group of individuals to have a much larger impact on the struggle against apartheid than might be first assumed. Sweden’s financial and moral support for the ANC is an important factor, as is its developed welfare state that afforded exiles some stability in times of precarity.