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perspectives on international relations. Because of Thabo Mbeki’s central role bothin government and in the ANC during his presidency, along with his many writingsavailable on the ANC’s website, it is possible to reconstruct some of the keyperceptual lenses employed in foreign policy decision making.The ANC had of necessity to evolve a more sophisticated agency as a foreign policyactor because of its banning by the Apartheid state in 1960. The organisationsubsequently moved underground and into exile, with the bulk of the responsibilityfor maintaining its existence in the hands of its External Mission. 355 The initial tasksof the External Mission were to establish and consolidate itself; raise funds;represent the ANC at international organisations; and, attend to the more secrettask of arranging training bases in a number of African countries for recruits ofUmkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, also referred to as MK), the armed wing ofthe ANC. 356 The need for international support, both material and ideological,compelled the organisation to clarify its ideological standpoints and politicalapproaches early on. Two concepts gained central importance: those of nonracialism,engineered to no small extent by the ANC’s alliance partner, the SouthAfrican Communist Party, and ‘Marxist Pan-Africanism’, also a consequence ofSACP influence. The ANC came under fire for its non-racial stance in an Africanatmosphere of independence from colonial rule and fervent Pan-Africanism in the1960s, and struggled to win recognition as the sole representative of South Africa’soppressed Black population. Meanwhile, the ANC-in-exile’s Marxist orientationsecured the crucial support of the Soviet Union, but did not win it any favoursamong Africa’s pre-eminent ‘Nationalist Pan-Africanists’ of the 1950s and 1960s,namely Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere.For much of its existence prior to its unbanning in 1994, the main focus of ANCforeign policy, as such, was three-fold: “to isolate South Africa by publicising theinjustices of apartheid and to call for the imposition of sanctions, while also forgingpolitical and ideological alliances with sympathetic states and other liberation movementsin support of the armed struggle”. A third objective was that the ANC be355 For an account of the ANC’s diplomacy in exile, and the centrality of the ExternalMission, see Scott Thomas, The Diplomacy of Liberation: The Foreign Relations of theANC Since 1960 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996).356 Thomas, The Diplomacy of Liberation, 26.155