A jailbreak, an exile, a secret mission and fifteen years in Delhi: Moosa Moolla’s extraordinary journey reveals how the ANC conducted diplomacy without a state, power or conventional legitimacy.

A raspy “hello” greeted me on the phone on a crisp Johannesburg morning in September 2014. I swiftly introduced myself to the octogenarian on the other side, the anti-apartheid struggle hero Moosa Moolla. Mosie, as he was fondly called, had spent over 15 years in India as the African National Congress’s (ANC) Chief Representative in the 1970s and 1980s. With elderly warmth, Mosie invited me for a chat. I turned up at his house the next day for a conversation on his time in India and much beyond.