At The Common Sense we have reported on former president Thabo Mbeki without the same mockery that we have heard elsewhere about “mad king Thabo and his mad ideas”. Rather, we have taken the line that it was the policies the African National Congress (ANC) was encouraged to adopt, and which in then did with such fervour, that sunk it. But that does not mean that Mbeki is wrong about the presence of nefarious actors infiltrated into and around his party to sink it.

On the contrary, we think there is something to what Mbeki suggests, although it did not occur quite as he suggests it did. Mbeki says that the last of South Africa’s apartheid-era intelligence chiefs refused to reveal the names of agents infiltrated into the ANC. The inference is that they were being protected for nefarious reasons and were later activated (around 2007) to bring the ANC down. That is a too crass and clichéd read of it and on too base a level. Instead, we would recommend a reading of a three-part essay series drafted by our columnist Mahan and published over the past month.

The series starts with the article Architects of Perception, which explains the active measures doctrine exposed to the West by Soviet dissidents such as Yuri Bezmenov, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Imants Lešinskis, and Oleg Kalugin.

The second is The Invisible Front: Ideological Subversion and the Erosion of Western (and South African?) Competitiveness. It focuses more on the broader West than on South Africa and lays out how the active measures doctrine came to be applied to contemporary Western democracies.

The third in the series is The Captured Liberation: Ideological Subversion and the Deindustrialisation of South Africa’s ANC and is required reading for any ANC strategists seeking to understand what went wrong in their party and what they need to do to turn it around.

Westerners broadly need to read this stuff too – especially those brought up and educated in the immediate “end of history” two decades that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. ANC strategists need to read and reread parts one and three carefully and ask whether any of what they read accords with their experience of the past 30 years? Especially with regard to part three, they need to think carefully about which actors and influences encouraged them to adopt some of their core policies, who encouraged them to stick with those policies when they came under fire, and then to double down on these even as the economy began to sink? And on the other side, as it were, who advised the ANC to revise and amend those policies, lest their consequences caused it to lose its majority, throwing the party into chaos and risking the collapse of the union? The warnings that the ANC would collapse were very directly and precisely issued.

The answers are exposed on the surface, but like an autostereogram, they will remain invisible until the party learns to look at the thing in the right way, which is to say that that party, and Mbeki, still do not see what has long been right in front of them. But until they see it and understand, they cannot start to save themselves.