ATTACKING THE HEART OF APARTHEID, the ANC's MK Special Operations Unit

362pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Penguin Books, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9781776392223

A history of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Special Operations Unit, formed under the direct command of ANC President Oliver Tambo and senior ANC and SACP leader Joe Slovo. This unit executed some of the most high-profile attacks against the apartheid state in the 1980s, including the 1980 Sasol bombings, the attack on Koeberg nuclear power station in 1982, the car bomb explosion outside Why Not and Magoo bars on Durban's beachfront in 1986, and the 1988 attack at the Witbank security police offices.

"This extraordinary book brings the ANC's most iconic military unit from myth into vivid life, drawing on extensive interviews with foot soldiers. It supplements granular detail with remarkable overviews that reveal the extent to which the author and other participants remained circumspect about violence as an end, and instead harnessed it as a means in an ultimately successful strategy of isolating the apartheid regime politically." Thula Simpson, Associate Professor of History, University of Pretoria, and author of Unkhonto we Siswe: The ANC's armed struggle

"It is all too easy, in these difficult times in world history, to expect courage to come cloaked in heroes garb. But, as Yunus Carrim illustrates so well in this urgent and necessary book, valour does not come only from heroes and heroines. It comes from ordinary people standing athwart the path of authoritarianism and saying: Enough! As this remarkable books show so poignantly, what made MK's Special Operations Unit exceptional is ... that they were average folks who decided, each in his or her own way, that the quest for freedom needed people to take risks. We should be glad they did. We should be grateful, too, that Carrim has documented their incredible stories. We need to hear these stories and to remember, especially in these dark times, the courage that drove so many ordinary individuals to achieve extraordinary things." Jacob Dlamini, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University, and author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's insurgents, collaborators, and the security police

Yunus Carrim has served in the executives of various organisations, including the Natal Indian Congress, SACP and Natal Midlands ANC. He has been an SACP Central Committee and Politburo member since 1995, was an ANC MP (1994-2024), and served as Deputy Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (2009-2013) and Minister of Communications (2013-2014). He is a former senior lecturer in sociology and a freelance journalist.