From 1967 onward, the ANC in exile recruited young non-South Africans classified as “white” to carry out clandestine solidarity missions because of their ability to travel freely around the country. Drawing on the recollections of these recruits, as documented in two books and presented in a series of webinars, this article examines how they exploited their white privilege to support the liberation struggle. By foregrounding female perspectives and focusing on the tensions caused by concealing political convictions, the article provides new insights into daily life in the underground movement and sheds light on this lesser-known dimension of international solidarity.

Revolutionary movements operated underground before and after national independence in many African countries. A communist party in Burkina Faso, the Parti communiste révolutionnaire voltaïque (PCRV), continued its underground political practice, despite democratic breakthrough. On the basis of long-term research engagement on popular struggle and the fight against impunity, the author used participant observation in street marches, meetings, sit-ins, and so on, and text analysis of pamphlets, declarations, and tracts to analyze how the PCRV is present in anti-imperialist struggles, while being absent in the public sphere.

Poetry played a unique role in disseminating anti-colonial thought and solidarity. I argue that the Anthology of Black Poetry in Portuguese (1958), and its circulation in Brazil, strengthen our understanding of this process. By tracing the production and circulation of this anthology as a cultural underground of decolonization, I demonstrate how its poetry articulated a grammar of blackness that resonated with the Brazilian, Thereza Santos. This grammar provided the foundation for Santos’s political solidarity with the African struggles for independence from Portugal. In the end, I reflect on the legacy and limits of poesia negra as a basis for solidarity.

In 1979, the Maoist-inspired cultural movement Front Culturel Sénégalais (FCS) renewed interest in Lamine Senghor’s La Violation d’un pays (1927) through the underground republication of this pioneering work. Exploring the material history of La Violation d’un pays through the FCS’s repurposing of Senghor’s legacy as a key figure of interwar anti-imperialism during the long 1960s—when ongoing decolonization movements and youth protests fueled new forms of anti-imperialism—reveals transtemporal forms of anti-imperial solidarity and or: highlights the role of underground literary production in political struggle.

The “revolutionary script” of Leninism was foundational to how the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) and Amilcar Cabral imagined the course of decolonization. Under-utilized archives and party documents highlight that the impact of the political-organizational model of Lenin was an early source of inspiration for PAIGC leaders, a fact which historians have not investigated in detail. The manner in which Leninism influenced the PAIGC was neither linear nor dogmatic, however. Dating from early exposure to Marxist texts in underground study circles to aborted attempts at launching armed struggle, party leaders constantly improvised upon the script with which they based their anti-colonial revolution.

We trace the formation of the Kadehine, a Mauritanian cultural and political movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with a focus on aspects of the “political underground” central to the movement’s strategies and organizing principles. As an anthropological history of the Kadehine, we focus on the organizing perspective afforded by its sources (largely interviews and movement literature). These sources emphasize the importance of clandestinity, as well as the influence of New Left ideas. We then develop a concept, “political underground,” describing the importance of clandestinity and its relationship to the radical politics of its time.