Looking back on his life in 2013, Andrew Mlangeni observed, ‘I was never in the forefront of the ANC, I was always a backroom boy. The police, the Special Branch, didn't know much about me … I was not arrested in the Treason Trial.’21 He was implying that he was not important enough in 1956 to be considered a threat to apartheid South Africa. It had never crossed his mind that he could be part of the national leadership which, he believed, was for the select few.

And indeed, into his forties, Andrew was often seen as an ‘everyman’, an ‘ordinary’ comrade rather than a leader – perhaps more in touch with the grass roots than the top ANC leadership. True, he had had an eventful life. As a mere schoolboy he joined the South African Communist Party youth league, and was exposed to various forms of struggle on different terrains. His rural origins on the white commercial farms of the Orange Free State subjected his family to the plight of black farm-dwellers, dispossessed servants of the colonial or settler master. As a teenager in Pimville, he saw, at first-hand, township poverty and, through the Sofasonke informal settlement movement, the struggle of black people for a place in the city and for service delivery. In 1946, he was actively distributing leaflets, together with a white comrade, Ruth First, agitating compound mineworkers to strike for higher wages and better working conditions. Andrew Mlangeni's grass-roots experience of the city and of migrant and agricultural working conditions were largely different from the involvements represented by Luthuli, Sisulu, Mandela and Tambo – all of whom were at the cusp of social change, with rural roots rather than an urban upbringing. Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela had rapidly moved from being newcomers to the city to becoming national trailblazers in the 1950s. They were influential, as leaders, in steering the ANC policy of consensus decision making but the leadership was also urgently in need of reliable and intelligent ‘backroom boys’, who would be the trusted go-betweens. In an increasingly difficult political environment, it was important to relay informal as well as formal communication through branches, to the grass-roots members. (As it later turned out, the ANC and MK were riddled with informers.)