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Satyandranath Raghunanan ‘Mac’ Maharaj, popularly known simply as Mac, is an authentic hero of South Africa’s liberation movement. He was active in the resistance to colonialism and apartheid since his student days, “reading into the struggle,” and getting involved with the structures of the South African Communist Party (SACP), outlawed in 1950 and clandestinely reconstituted in 1953, and of the Congress Alliance under the leadership of the A frican National Congress (ANC), attaining leadership positions in both the organisations. Paraphrasing the words of Joe Slovo, one might say that he decided early in his life that his one and only target was to remove the racist regime in his country and obtain power for the people. He never wavered in this objective despite arrests, gruesome torture, imprisonment including a stint of 12 years on Robben Island, exile, underground work in extremely dangerous circumstances inside South Africa in the late 1980s as the commander of the highly clandestine “Operation Vula” launched under the initiation of the highest level of the leadership of the liberation movement in exile, the destruction of his first marriage and dislocations in his second resulting in his becoming a stranger to his children (“We were unable to dance with them,” as Nelson Mandela puts it in his moving and unusually long and detailed introduction acknowledging and admiring Mac’s leadership qualities) — one can go on. Mac would be the first to admit that most politically active South Africans experienced such dangers and deprivations in some degree or the other; the whole nation still carries the wounds and scars of that historic hurt.

This massive and richly documented political biography provides a most comprehensive insight into the making of the remarkable character and personality of its protagonist. The narrative is marked both by passion and scepticism. The documentation is supported by 71 pages of endnotes, apart from a variety of published and unpublished sources, including a vast number of interviews conducted over two decades (1885-2005). Interviews specifically related to Mac Maharaj were conducted over more than a decade, between August 1993 and December 2005. Seventy-seven of the interviews were on record, though some of these are embargoed till 2030. Very much a work of the era of the internet, the interviews and other source materials are available in the website, www.omalley.co.za, which opens several doors. The book is both contemporary history and a rich source book for future historians.

Further, the book is also as much a biography as an autobiography. Barring the introduction and the final chapter the protagonist’s voice is heard throughout, supplementing and sustaining the biographer’s account. The two voices are not modified even when there is some variance between the two. A sustained study of the book, along with the material on the website, will no doubt reveal other discrepancies and contradictions. But such internal variations are more a matter of nuance and emphasis, and are also informed by the personalities recollecting the past and their relation with the protagonist. Mac has said that he had a commitment to the author not to see the copy till it was accepted by the publisher.

When Mac finally “came home” after receiving indemnity in June 1990 (though he had been inside South Africa under deep cover since August 1998 directing Operation Vula) he should have been able to take part in the transition process openly with his other colleagues in the ANC and the SACP. This was not to be. “Vula” came unravelled in July 1990 when the security forces tumbled on to some documents, leading to the arrest of Mac, his deputy commander Siphiwe Nyanda (Gebuza), later to become the head of the South African National Defence Force, and more than 20 others. At least two of the arrested persons simply “disappeared”. They are now known to have been killed. All this took place when the regime had lifted the ban on the ANC and the SACP, and was talking to Nelson Mandela and other leaders.

How did this happen? The story is incredibly complex, and only bits of it have been revealed by some of the principal actors, like Ronnie Kasrils, at present South Africa’s Minister for Intelligence (Armed and Dangerous, Mayibuye Books, Cape Town, 1993, 1998) and Vladimir Shubin, Soviet scholar and activist long involved with the South African liberation movement (ANC: A View from Moscow, Mayibuye Books, Cape Town, 1999). Indeed these authors themselves admit that the whole story is yet to be told. While this book deals extensively with Vula, and provides rich details of its international ramifications, and the commander of the operations himself speaks, one is still not clear if the whole story will ever be told. Some persons within the leadership of the broad liberation movement (like Joe Modise, Chief of Staff of Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the ANC), were deliberately kept out of the loop, reflecting the anxieties about penetration of apartheid agents at the leadership levels. There was resentment over this fact when Vula came unravelled following Mac’s arrest.

According to Zarina Maharaj, Mac’s wife (Dancing to a Different Rhythm: A Memoir; Zebra Press, Cape Town, 2006) some of these ANC leaders openly said following Mac’s arrest that Vula did not have the sanction of the ANC, and Mac was therefore having his comeuppance. She suggests, as this biography too does, that Mac’s subsequent problems following his stepping down from office at the end of the Mandela Presidency, can be traced to the differences in exile politics as well as, more crucially to Mac being the ultimate “unapologetic Indian”, very certain of his South African identity, an inalienable part of the oppressed black majority. This last point is indeed the core of Mac’s personality which he has not allowed to be damaged.

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