This article focuses on political education, a vital but neglected component in histories of education within South Africa's liberation movement in exile during the 1970s and 1980s. The article shows how in conditions of exile the idea of political education as a forward-looking, home-bound form of education was counterposed to a notion of "refugee education". It explores its relationship to the idea of "peoples' education" that had emerged through the National Education Crisis/Coordinating Committee (NECC) inside South Africa, how it entered the educational debate through the ANC's Lusaka and London Education Committees in connection with the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO), and the roles of Jack Simons and Harold Wolpe. As such, it contributes to more complex understandings of the relationship between the national and transnational, and the entanglement and interconnections of practices and ideas across time and space.