The Party of the Century - Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party, 1921–2021 By Tom Lodge. Auckland Park: Jacana, 2021, and Suffolk: James Currey, 2022. Pp. 626. R380.00, Jacana paperback (ISBN: 9781431421342); £70, James Currey hardcover (ISBN: 9781847013217); £24.00, e-book (ISBN: 9781800105102).

Abstract

expelled from the party when Dadoo was its chairman. This broader context is not mentioned, and there is no mention either that it had been a central committee decision that Dadoo should leave the country to mobilise international solidarity and consolidate the external structures of the party, 6 so Turok's snide remark is the only reason given as to why Dadoo was sent abroad.These caveats aside, the book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on South Africa's revolutionary turn. The attempt to bring about a revolution in South Africa was ultimately defeated by the apartheid state's brutal repression, mass arrests, and imprisonments, including that of Mandela, or, for those who managed to escape, political exile, and apartheid was to remain in place for the next thirty years. While the strategic shift from nonviolence to armed insurrection is often blamed for the apartheid state's ensuing retaliation, Landau importantly reminds us that 'Mandela and his comrades could not see the future' but, in a Marxist sense, '[t]hey tried to make it' (292).