It was laid-out as an Area for Coloureds and erected to house the middle income group, about 30 years ago! Parts of it quickly deteriorated into little more than ‘urban ghetto's’ - a description so often applied to these ready-made slums erected by former Apartheid rulers to separate Whites from other race Citizens.
At seven p.m. sharp, seven nights a week, during the darkest days of apartheid, an incendiary radio broadcast beamed out from Lusaka, Zambia. It began with the clack of machine-gun fire, followed by a familiar call-and-response:
Amandla Ngawethu!
“Power to the People!”
The shooting faded in and out, waxing and waning with the chant.
Helen Newton Thompson, an anti-apartheid political activist and founding member of the Black Sash, has for the most part of history, been a fleeting footnote mentioned once or twice among her better known, women comrades.
Benita Parry