Sometimes it is easier to remember a single moment of protest – a day, an action, a single dead soul – than it is to remember the ways in which that protest continued, changed, mutated, and developed into something new
Posts tagged as “apartheid”
On 21 March 1960, people gathered at the police station in Sharpeville without their passbooks, deliberately challenging the system. They were not armed. They were not violent. They were asserting their dignity.
In the aftermath of Maseru, a massacre that claimed 42 lives (including two children), Maroo’s “blood-stained suit was vivid in telling his near-death story that he neither had a chance or a heart to tell”, noted Lebo, who went to exile with her father in 1978, never to meet again. To mitigate, ANC’s top brass redeployed its operatives to Lusaka.
More than four decades after Sobukwe’s death, unresolved questions surrounding his treatment, his illness, and the political motives of his persecutors continue to echo across South Africa’s legal and political landscape.
Nkrosi Lesiba Maraba II who was murdered and beheaded by Voortrekkers in the 1800s falls in that category of forgotten anti-colonial resistance heroes whose lives…
As the leader of the most ‘successful’ ethnic homeland of the apartheid era, Bophuthatswana, Lucas Mangope was a controversial figure. His legacy still divides opinion…
Having died as a ‘commoner’ and prisoner what are the lessons that can be learnt from this hero, especially in the context of the anti-apartheid struggles that we in the 1950s and beyond? What kind of foundation can we justifiably attribute to a leader such as Langalibalele? How did that foundation shape the politics of later leaders such as Mabhida, Mandela, Sobukwe, Hani and many others?
“Seeing newborn babies suffer while some mothers bleed to death should keep us all awake at night."
Remarkably, he survived being shot seventeen times at a student’s funeral in Natalspruit, Gauteng Province and endured over 586 days in solitary confinement in 1969. Magubane’s resistance was not only evident in his actions but also in his creative methods of capturing the truth.
The Land Claims Court of South Africa has ordered that a family that has had their land rights taken away under apartheid be compensated financially…