South African Communist Party (SACP) is a political party in South Africa. It was founded in 1921 as the Communist Party of South Africa by the joining together of the International Socialist League and others under the leadership of Willam H. Andrews.

The SACP is a partner of the Tripartite Alliance which consists of the African National Congress and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

The Communist Party of South Africa first came to prominence during the armed Rand Rebellion by white mineworkers in 1922. The large mining concerns, facing labour shortages and wage pressures, had announced their intention of liberalizing the rigid colour bar within the mines and elevate some blacks to minor supervisory positions. (The vast majority of white miners mainly held supervisory positions over the laboring black miners.) The CPSA supported the strike against the mining concerns from a class perspective in the context of the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class but condemned the demand to preserve the colour bar as well as the slogan "Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!". With the failure of the rising, in part due to black workers failing to strike, the Communist Party was forced by Comintern to adopt the Native Republic thesis which stipulated that South Africa was a country belonging to the Natives, that is, the Blacks. The Party thus reoriented itself at its 1924 Party Congress towards organising black workers and "Africanising" the party. By 1928, 1,600 of the party's 1,750 members were Black. In 1929, the party adopted a "strategic line" which held that "The most direct line of advance to socialism runs through the mass struggle for majority rule". By 1948 the Party had officially abandoned the Native Republic policy.

Chris Hani, born Martin Thembisile Hani (28 June 1942 – 10 April 1993) was the leader of the South African Communist Party and chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). He was a fierce opponent of the apartheid government. He was assassinated on 10 April 1993.

Hani was born on 28 June 1942 in the small town of Cofimvaba in a rural village called kuSabalele Transkei. He was the fifth of six children. He attended Lovedale school and later studied modern and classical literature at the University of Fort Hare. Hani, in an interview on the Wankie campaign, also mentions that he is a Rhodes University graduate.

At age 15 Hani joined the ANC Youth League. As a student he was active in protests against the Bantu Education Act. Following his graduation, he joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC. Following his arrest under the Suppression of Communism Act, he went into exile in Lesotho in 1963.

He received military training in the Soviet Union and served in campaigns in the Rhodesian Bush War in what is now Zimbabwe. Though the combined operations of MK and ZIPRA in the late 1960s were a military failure, they consolidated Hani's reputation as a brave soldier of the first black army to take the field against aparthied. His role as a fighter from the earliest days of MK's exile (following the arrest of Nelson Mandela and the other internal MK leaders at Rivonia) was an important part in the fierce loyalty Hani enjoyed later as MK's commander. In Lesotho he was the target of assassination attempts, and he eventually moved to the ANC's headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. As head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, he was responsible for the suppression of a mutiny by dissident ANC members in detention camps, but denied any role in abuses including torture and murder.