This was the world of Mandela and his comrades, and this was the world that gave birth to today's ANC. Few of Mandela's admirers, who seem to think of him as a Martin Luther King or Gandhi of Africa, appear to appreciate this Communist background. The international context has since dramatically changed — but not the ANC's Soviet vision of the world. The ANC in power is still trying to build socialism (nationalisation and redistribution) through its NDR. Many of its current leaders still believe that Communism is the best and quickest way to prosperity and general happiness. It is not by chance that the ANC invites Cuban doctors to treat South African patients and Cuban engineers to repair South African water pipes. There is no logic behind such decisions except political sympathy.

But this was just one aspect of Soviet influence on the ANC. When the SACP leaders decided to launch armed struggle Mandela was sent to seek assistance in Africa but his closest comrades went to the USSR. The Soviets agreed to help. For three decades, from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, thousands of ANC cadres, generation after generation, were trained in the Soviet Union or by Soviet military advisers and specialists in Angola. It is difficult to calculate how many of them received such training, as some returned several times, but Viacheslav Shiriaiev, the first Soviet main military adviser to the ANC in Angola, reckoned that in 1979-1983 alone about 6,000 cadres were trained. And a remarkable 95 per cent of the ANC leadership received some form of Soviet military training. 

This did not mean training in purely technical military skills. The most basic background course, taught to every ANC military cadre and practically to all the leadership of the organisation in exile — often more than once — was MCW, or Military Combat Work. The course included instructions in the organisation of the military underground and in the waging of an underground revolutionary war. Some researchers believe that the ANC leadership got the idea of the bloody "people's war" which unfolded in South Africa's townships in the late 1980s — replete with necklacings, targeted assassinations and terrifying "people's courts" —from Vietnam. An ANC delegation visited Vietnam in the late 1970s to benefit from the wisdom of General Giap. But long before then MCW provided manuals on how the "people's war" should be organised and waged. Ronnie Kasrils, one of the ANC's top military commanders, described MCW as the "major influence" on the changes in ANC policy (ie, its adoption of the "people's war"). 

But MCW was even more influential than that. The course contained as much political indoctrination as practical advice on the subversion of a state. It offered the same principles and ideas as the ANC's political documents but without the veneer that the official and open status of such documents required. It described "Lenin's principles of party leadership of MCW" and hailed the goals of the NDR which included not only democracy and self-determination, but also "the redistribution of wealth, of land and other means of production", which, in the view of the authors, should "dramatically improve the living and working standards of the oppressed", as well as the "implementation of the Freedom Charter with its programme of profound agrarian transformation and socialisation of those sectors of the economy in the grip of Monopoly Capitalism". By the late 1980s the MCW had become the ideological, strategic and tactical foundation of the whole movement. According to Kasrils, long an SACP stalwart, the pamphlet, based on the course but written by South African disciples, became its "Bible". 

Soviet military assistance to the ANC involved not only military training, but also the supply of arms, ammunition, uniforms and, in effect, every facility needed in the military camps. Umkhonto we Sizwe received an enormous boost in the late 1970s, when the youth of the Soweto generation fled the country in their thousands in order to fight the regime. There was nowhere for them to go but the ANC camps in Angola, which were built by the Soviets and maintained by Soviet supplies.