There is a danger that the history of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile may be seen as one of perpetual crisis. There were, in fact, only two major crises within the ANC in Zambia during its more than 25 years in the country. The first of these was in 1969 and followed the failure of the Wankie and Sipolilo Campaigns. The second was the so-called Shishita crisis, which began with a foiled Zambian coup plot in October 1980 and spread to the ANC throughout the region.

This chapter seeks to understand what was going on in Zambia at the time and what the ANC, and its intelligence and security department, thought was going on. The chapter concludes with a comparison between the security department's Shishita Report of 1981, with its tendency towards conspiratorial explanations and its identification of criticism of the leadership with subversion, and the very different, and infinitely more critical, Stuart Report (Commission of Inquiry into Recent Developments in the People's Republic of Angola) into the Viana mutiny, the first of the two mutinies that occurred within Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in Angola in 1984. This report rejected conspiratorial explanations and examined that mutiny in historical perspective.

It is not suggested that there was necessarily a progressive evolution of ideas about security, subversion and internal democracy in the three years that separated the reports, but the latter, though temporarily obscured by a second mutiny in Angola, did pave the way for the national consultative conference at Kabwe in Zambia in June 1985, which adopted a code of conduct and provided for the establishment for the first time of internal judicial procedures. The conference also recommended, as the report had done, an overhaul of the department of intelligence and security.

The organisers of the failed Zambian coup had hoped to exploit the popular disillusionment that followed the failure of the liberation of Zimbabwe to produce ‘a peace dividend’ for Zambia. Zimbabwe's multiparty elections had also raised questions about democracy in Zambia and about the wisdom of the country's support for the Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu), in particular, and of liberation movements in general.