Ruth First

Voices of Liberation

This book explores the apartheid legacies of the city and demonstrates that cultural life flourished through peoples resilience in spite of adversity. Authors move beyond apartheid history to analyse the reflective ways in which people are coming to terms with that history through memory work, performance and memorialisation. Other chapters provide contemporary views of local interactions such as moments of urban violence or people negotiating the challenges of a globalised world.

This is the story of one mans single-minded, unremitting, always creative, campaign to provide material support to South Africas liberation struggle, assisting leaders like Nelson Mandela and ordinary township and rural activists, as well as families who suffered because their loved ones were political prisoners, had fled into exile or been killed by the apartheid regime.

This series celebrates the lives and writings of South African and African liberation activists and heroes. The human, social and literary contexts presented in this series have a critical resonance and bearing on where we come from, who we are and how we can choose to shape our destiny.

Out of History brings together exciting and innovative work in History and the Humanities. Drawing upon papers which have been presented at the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar at the University of the Western Cape, the book reflects upon how this space fashioned new histories of the South African past over the last twenty years. Written by leading scholars in fields of visual history, public history, heritage, linguistics, oral history and postcolonial studies, the contributions address critical questions about the production of academic knowledge and the status of the Humanities in the post-apartheid present.