This book takes a refreshing look at relations between southern Africa and North Korea, freed from the blinkers of Cold War preconceptions. Van der Hoog provides a vital insight into that unique relationship which began in the 1960s and is ongoing, writes John Green.
Strong relationships between African countries and North Korea, on the face of it, appear to be somewhat unlikely, given that Korea has had no traditional links with the African continent, but the events following Korea’s liberation from Japanese occupation and the Korean war, changed that constellation.
The driving force behind the African liberation movements was a quest for self-determination, not ideological competition. Aid from countries like North Korea became a necessary lifeline for those liberation movements. “The Cold War was shaping but not driving the interactions between African liberation movements and their North Korean comrades. They did not see their alliance as a Cold War issue only the outside world did,” van der Hoog writes.
African solidarity itself was not enough to support the needs of the liberation struggles, and Western countries viewed most of the liberation movements as proto-communist insurgents and withheld support, so the movements became highly dependent on support from the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and to a lesser extent the GDR. They couldn’t avoid being sucked into the vortex of Cold War tensions.
The North Korean idea that the people ‘must be united into one organisation with one ideology under the guidance of the party and the leader’ is equally applicable to southern Africa and North Korean contexts,” van der Hoog says.
Whereas the doors of the Western world remained firmly closed to African diplomats, the gates to the East were swung open, especially those in Asia following the 1955 Bandung Conference. There was a breakthrough in Afro-Asian solidarity. The founding of an Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation and the Non-Aligned Movement presented new opportunities for African liberation.
During Kenneth Kaunda’s 1982 visit to North Korea, its leader Kim Il Sung stated, that he “would make every effort to strengthen unity and solidarity among the independent forces of the world.” In 2012, 30 years after that visit to North Korea, a bus load of North Korean construction workers arrived in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. They came to help build a museum to commemorate the history of Namibia’s liberation struggle. North Korea has clearly not broken the links it fostered with the continent during the Cold War.
Van der Hoog has carried out detailed research in numerous archives, but unfortunately didn’t have access to North Korea’s own archives which are not, as yet, accessible to Western researchers.
His research for this book, was also hampered by the Covid pandemic which prevented his carrying out face-to-face interviews with key actors from the freedom struggles, who had encountered North Koreans either in exile or on the battlefield.
Van der Hoog takes a refreshingly non-partisan approach to this subject and distances himself from the Cold War and anti-communist clichés of the past. While he is no admirer or supporter of the North Korean government, he attempts here to adopt a disinterested viewpoint, dealing with the facts as much as they are known, rather than viewing relations through distorting ideological spectacles.
After the Korean War (1950-53), North Korea, despite strong ties with China and the Soviet Union, pursued an independent course. It joined the Non-Aligned Movement after the Bandung Conference in 1955 and for many African countries and liberation organisations it became a sought after partner. It had also, only recently thrown off the Japanese colonial yoke and appeared to be a vibrant country with strong nationalist traditions and one to be emulated. North Korea offered African liberation movements support for both paths to power identified by Julius Nyerere as, “through the conference and the battlefield”.
Most histories view that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a conclusion of the Cold War as the end of an era, but North Korean ties to African nations continue still today. Despite being subjected to the most draconian UN sanctions regime and its diplomats continue to engage in a wide range of activities in Africa.
Van der Hoog argues that liberation, rather than the Cold War was the leitmotif of North Korean-African relations. During and after the Cold War North Korea offered support primarily to the political leaderships of those liberation movements and governments, providing arms and training to the freedom fighters. Today, the majority of states in southern Africa are ruled by regimes that are rooted in the liberation struggles and it was those early liberation movements which were supported by North Korea.
During the Cold War, most research looked at communist entanglements in Africa and was invariably motivated by Western fears of communism taking hold in the rapidly decolonising African continent. The targets were seen as the Soviet Union, China and, to a lesser extent, Cuba; North Korea was ignored or deemed simply to be an adjunct of the Soviet bloc.
Most literature on African-North Korean relations reduces the African continent to a chessboard of geopolitics, where African nations are mere pawns in a global battle for influence. Van der Hoog counters this viewpoint by focussing on African agency.
Between 1960 and 1990, southern Africa as a region was engulfed in revolution; the end of the Second World War unleashed a whirlwind of nationalist campaigns for self-determination and freedom from colonial rule. Numerous freedom fighters poured into exile in the Frontline States, like Zambia and Tanzania, where most of the liberation movements established headquarters and training camps. It was there that future governments were established in model form. For African liberation fighters Tanzania’s capital Dar-es-Salaam became a “hub of decolonisation” and which Angola’s Agostinho Neto described as “one of the heroic capitals of African resistance to colonial and racist rule”. It hosted the largest North Korean embassy in Africa, built by the North Koreans themselves.
North Korean aid in the early years, during the ongoing liberation struggles, was given to the liberation movements themselves – those deemed important enough and ideologically more in tune with North Korean views. For instance, in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), North Korea first lent its support to Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU but later switched it to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU, which eventually took power (although the Soviet Union continued to support Nkomo). North Korea was responsible for much of the military training given to the ZANU guerrilla army.
Military-related agreements between Mugabe and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung have existed since 1980, just after Mugabe overthrew white rule. Of all foreign powers, why did Mugabe develop a relationship with the reclusive North Koreans? Much of it has to do with his trip to North Korea that year and his efforts since to emulate the state and the personality cult of North Korean leaders. Mugabe “came back almost a different man,” according to a former member of his government. “He was tremendously impressed by the stadiums full of people doing mass calisthenics and mass visual displays spelling out Kim’s name or even depicting his face. He returned wanting to change the constitution so that he could become president, like Kim.” After his return from the DPRK, he modelled his birthday celebrations and mass rallies on those he saw in North Korea.
Mugabe was also enamoured of North Korea’s Juche ideology (North Korea’s own ideology – Juche – incorporates historical materialist ideas of Marxism–Leninism but also strongly emphasizes the individual, the nation state, and national sovereignty. Juche propounds that a country will prosper once it has become self-reliant by achieving political, economic, and military independence). Such ideas found ready ears among many African leaders contemplating the future of their liberated countries: an ideology neither capitalist nor Soviet.
In October 1980 Mugabe signed an agreement with North Korea that stipulated that 106 North Korean military advisors would train and equip 3,500 soldiers loyal to Mugabe’s political party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU).
One group, under the command of Major General Sin Hyon Dok, trained the notorious Fifth Brigade, which would go on to kill 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland (the horrendous Gukurahundi massacre) who had remained loyal to Mugabe’s main political opponent, Joshua Nkomo, and his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). I interviewed people in Matabeleland in 1987 who had survived the massacres and they told me of the horrors committed by those North Korean trained troops. How far the North Koreans themselves can be blamed for this action is, of course, a moot point, as it was Mugabe’s Zimbabwean troops that carried it out. But as a consequence, the North Koreans do not have a glorious reputation among sections of the Zimbabwean populace.
This book is an excellent contribution to the literature on African liberation struggles during the 20th century, which avoids Cold War and anti-communist clichés.
John Green is a former trade union official, a journalist and former documentary film-maker, which in the 1970s involved clandestine filming assignments in South Africa in the 1970s aimed at helping bring the abhorrent practices of the apartheid regime to world attention. He is the author of numerous books, including Ken Sprague, People’s Artist, A Revolutionary Life: Biography of Friedrich Engels and Britain’s Communists: The Untold Story.
Comrades Beyond the Cold War – North Korea and Liberation of Southern Africa. By Tycho van der Hoog. Pubs. Hurst & Co. Pbck. £25
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