Apartheid—The Global Itinerary

by  Louise Bethlehem  -- In 1996, Leon de Kock and Ian Tromp published an anthology entitled The Heart in Exile: South African Poetry in English, 1990-1995 . The volume included a poem by Denis Hirson, “The Long-Distance South African,” recounting Hirson’s experience of viewing the televised broadcast of Nelson Mandela’s triumphant release from prison at a long geographical remove from South Africa. Hirson, a poet and writer, is the son of the anti-apartheid activist, physicist and later historian, Baruch Hirson, who was a key figure in the Armed Resistance Movement (ARM) in South Africa in the early 1960s. The family left South Africa following Baruch Hirson’s release from prison in 1973. I had gone to primary school in Johannesburg with Denis’s younger sister, Zoë. But by the time I encountered the poem, I had been living in Israel for over a decade. Unlike the Hirsons, my displacement was self-imposed. I had no official genealogy of political exile to claim. But Denis Hirso...

by Roni Mikel Arieli -- In the opening paragraph of Shirli Gilbert's (2012) article about representations of Anne Frank in South Africa, she describes how Ahmed Kathrada—an anti-apartheid activist imprisoned for eighteen years on Robben Island—secretly recorded inspiring quotations from The Diary of Anne Frank in his prison notebooks, among other quotations from books and newspapers smuggled into prison. In November 2014, I visited the Robben Island Archives and located the handwritten words that Kathrada recorded from The Diary, passages that were very much oriented to Anne Frank's longing for freedom and optimistic hope, on the one hand, and to Jewish suffering and the morbidities of the war, on the other. Excited about this finding, I turned to Kathrada's Memoirs, a volume that confirmed my gut feeling about possible imaginative links drawn by him, between the Holocaust and his own situation—as an Indian South African, as a political activist, and as a prisoner of the ...

 by Tal Zalmanovich -- This July, I arrived in Johannesburg for the first time. A historian of Modern Britain, I had recently begun researching British activists who participated in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and their influence on the discourse of race relations in Britain. After several visits to archives in Britain and months poring over documents I had gathered there, I was eager to follow in the footsteps of some of my protagonists. My first stop was the Sophiatown Heritage Centre dedicated to the memory of a ghost neighbourhood. Sophiatown was an abnormality in South African terms – a neighbourhood in which black South Africans could own their houses, where a local culture was forged in jazz clubs, in shebeens, in crowded rooms and dark allies. The cultural production of its inhabitants had a lasting impact on literature, journalism, fashion, music and speech. It was the product of Johannesburg’s rapid urbanisation in all its gore and glory. In 1955, th...