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.

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.

Entry into terrorist organizations has often been described from an extrinsic perspective, as a biographical rupture. However, the “careers” of activists from illegal Basque far-left and national liberation organizations show continuities, underscored by the players themselves. We used a model developed by Snow and McAdam [2000] to understand the "identity work" that accompanies integration and participation in clandestine groups. Two major forms of identity work characterize entry into the organizations studied: “identity convergence” and “identity amplification”. These results suggest a need to reconsider the heuristic relevance of the concepts of radicalization and tip over into terrorism. They also help clarify the role of both cognitive and affective group identification within the identity redefinition process for the individuals involved.

This paper reflects on a decade and a half of ethnographic research on five different topics: patronage politics, the intricate relationship between clientelism and collective action, the role of clandestine connections in politics, urban marginality and environmental suffering, and poor people's waiting as a way of experiencing political domination. The paper examines the contributions that political ethnography can make to a better understanding of these themes and highlights areas for further empirical and theoretical work.