There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
THE recent deaths, within a few weeks of one another, of two prominent lawyers, both ex-Robben Island prisoners, focused rare and brief attention on the Unity Movement (UM, formerly the Non-European Unity Movement founded in […]
IN October 1973 Aurora Cricket Club took to the field as the first multi-ethnic team in modern times to play in a white league in South Africa. The events of that day, and the circumstances […]
‘I know it is difficult … but we’ve got to think more clearly than the state allows.’ This is how Peter Sacks in a poetic tribute published in 1986 remembered the teaching of Richard Turner. […]
ON 6 October 2013 doctor and volunteer trade unionist Neil Aggett would have celebrated his sixtieth birthday. Instead, half a lifetime ago, he died on 5 February 1982 at his own hand in a cell […]
‘UDF unites, apartheid divides’: around this ringing slogan the United Democratic Front was launched on 20 August 1983. The South African security state was at its most active, and turning to increasingly violent and illegal […]
HARD though it is to believe, twenty years have passed since the Rand Daily Mail folded and the Weekly Mail started publication. Its founders pooled redundancy payments and donations to launch the paper and some […]
FAMILIAR faces vanished – people went on the run, kept their heads down, or disappeared into detention under the Public Safety Act. The winter of 1986 in Pietermaritzburg was grey and menacing, courtesy of weather […]
ON the night of 5 December 1986, three trade unionists from Mpophomeni were killed on a quiet stretch of road near Lion’s River in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Their burnt bodies were discovered in the early hours of […]
ONE of the main characteristics of the State of Emergency is its attempt to enforce a regime of censorship on society. It is therefore not surprising that most people in Pietermaritzburg are unaware that between […]
PRISON hunger strikes summon images of Suffragettes or the Northern Ireland troubles, but 25 years ago, in a largely forgotten episode, Pietermaritzburg experienced its own. The strikers were State of Emergency detainees held without charge, trial or […]