On 26 and 27 March 2019, almost 60 years since the Sharpeville Massacre, a group of 50 or more veterans from the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), came together for a conference at Liliesleaf, which is now a ‘space of liberation’, a museum and conference centre, but was once the site of a dramatic police raid, in 1963, which led to the imprisonment of most of the African National Congress's (ANC) executive leadership. At this conference, on multiple occasions I witnessed MK members saying, ‘we fought against apartheid … and apartheid ended.’ Likewise, younger people in the audience repeatedly congratulated the veterans for having taken up arms, and therefore for ending apartheid. In other words, there was no need to fill in the missing information that is contained within the ellipses. We fought … we won. Story told.

As the veterans told their personal stories about their time in the military underground, I saw that all stories were received as heroic accounts, regardless of the actual details. One veteran spoke of the disastrous failure to bring a large ship down the east coast of Africa, intended to land in the Transkei, to launch a guerrilla uprising, in imitation of the Cubans. The veteran recounted the way in which ‘the boat got sick’ and had to turn back again and again, never making it further south than Dar es Salaam. Another veteran recounted, in gripping detail – and with a remarkable sense of humour – being one of a group of soldiers instructed to march through Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the Zambian border in the north and attempt to infiltrate South Africa. Desperate for food and water, the group found themselves wandering through a game reserve, hunting zebra (‘the striped quagga’) while being hunted down themselves by the Rhodesian special forces. Many of his comrades died, and he spent months in jail.