For three decades, Ronnie Kasrils engaged in a transnational crusade to bring about the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. A founder member of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP), the former government minister began his revolutionary odyssey sixty years ago this month: narrowly escaping a police crackdown on anti-apartheid militants by crossing the border from South Africa into modern-day Botswana with his wife and comrade Eleanor in September 1963.

Before his return to the African frontline as MK’s military intelligence chief, Kasrils coordinated secret missions to support underground work inside of South Africa. From the Eastern Bloc to the East End by way of Dar es Salaam, these operations — and the volunteers who undertook them — played a vital role in the struggle to bring down apartheid rule, and have been finally recognized at length in Kasrils’s latest book, International Brigade Against Apartheid: Secrets of the People’s War That Liberated South Africa.

Compiled at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the edited collection brings together stories and accounts from across the sweep of the anti-apartheid international: from guerilla combatants to civil society campaigners, and the clandestine assignments of Kasrils’s renowned “London Recruits.” Owen Dowling sat down with Kasrils to discuss the book — and a life spent in internationalist struggle.