Deseni Soobben was 10 when her grandfather, a businessman returned from a trip to Japan and gave her a Kodak lnstamatic camera.
When I got arrested it was through Winnie. I got arrested in Winnie’s car, and when I got to the island I talked to him about Winnie, very strongly, to say that I didn’t think that she had done the right thing by me, that she exposed me to the police, and by associating with someone whom she ought to have known was an informer, because that’s how I got arrested.[1]
Breytenbach was born in 1933 and grew up in Bonnievale in the Cape Winelands. His father was a farmer. Later the family moved to Wellington in Cape Town. As a young man he was supposed to become a teacher but admitted that he would have “killed those kids”. As an 18-year-old, he went to the offices of Die Burger where he was handed a camera and told that he could start as a photographer in 1951.
Chris Qwazi, a photo-journalist, started out as a freelancer in the 1980s at a time of increased resistance against Apartheid in Port Elizabeth, and the Eastern Cape.
Nomhle Nkonyeni was born on 9 April 1942 in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape. She started her acting career at the age of 19 years. In 2002, she received her Master’s degree in Theatre for Development in the United Kingdom from the King Alfred College.
Jon Lynton David Hrusa was born in Cape Town on October 24 1965. He matriculated from St Stithians College in the mid-1980’s and went on to study at Wits University. His plan to study medicine was short-lived as he only spent six months at Wits before dropping out.
This essay discusses my experiences and recollections of the 1957 bus boycott in Alexandra, the township in which I grew up. Unusually, it was a freehold area in which Africans could own land, and my parents owned two properties there.