We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2025
Conspiracy minded
Barbara Hogan estimated that ‘a hundred or more’ people were detained during her time.
This was significant: it was African, it was Indian, it was coloured and it was whites; quite a lot of whites. It was firstly an indication that there was a big nonracial something happening, but secondly that whites were beginning to identify with the ANC … certainly they also thought that they really had captured the entire leadership of this post-1976 mass movement that was Congress aligned. They were very cocksure of themselves. They were stupid. In the early phase of my interrogation, they were bragging to me that there would be van loads of us standing trial, the biggest treason trial, much bigger than the ‘56 treason trial. And they were cock-ahoop. They really thought they’d cracked it. When they weren't able to establish the evidence that would stand up (even in a prejudiced apartheid court) of the linkages between the ANC and these activists, the organisational linkages, suddenly their case looked a whole lot weaker.
Contrary to what the security police might have imagined at the time, the political climate among young opponents of apartheid in the late 1970s was fluid, contested and experimental. Devan Pillay, a young man raised in East London, classified racially as Indian, and studying at Rhodes University, found himself right in the middle of all of these different political trajectories. Along with his friend Lindy Harris and a white lecturer at Rhodes named Guy Berger, Pillay was part of a reading group, which had been organised with the explicit goal of understanding the ANC and Marxism more deeply. At the same time, Pillay had some contact with people who were active in the ANC underground, including Mandla Gxanyana, and a distant relative of his, whom the ANC sent to recruit Pillay. In other words, according to Pillay, ‘I was sort of ready to be recruited into a political project … But I wasn't yet recruited.’
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
