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1. Helen
   Member

   What's it like? I'd love to hear your thoughts before I buy it...

   
   

   Posted: 7 months #
2. Kelwyn Sole
   Member

   I've only just started, Helen - I will. If I had been further in, and knew what I thought, I would have gone down the road to listen tonight. I only met Neil once, in the kitchen of our commune in Yeoville, although I walked the 9 or so kms at his funeral. At the graveside, suddenly a stentorian young voice ..."he was not a terrorist, he was a hero". The book's reminding me of the intersection of different groups on the left in those years, the similarities and the differences - it was complex in there. Odd feeling - mixture of sadness and reflection.

   
   

   Posted: 7 months #
3. Kelwyn Sole
   Member

   Helen, in answer to your question: from about p. 80, a pattern is starting to show. I started off thinking the book was very much from the outside (she left in the mid-1960s), but careful and ethically scrupulous - putting things simply, rather than making judgments. However, when it gets into the nitty-gritty of the 1970s, it strikes me that a loyalist ideology starts to be put forward, without any sense of the arguments within the left, and the white left, at the time.
   For instance - FOSATU obviously has to be replaced by COSATU, apparently, because FOSATU 'avoids politics'. This is only marginally true, certainly less so as the struggle deepened. My understanding at the time was that this was also an issue about maintaining the independence of the trade unions vis-a-vis a political party, any political party: a viewpoint that starts to make some sense today, in the wake of NUM's behaviour re Marikana. There are other examples of this.
   It is worth reading mostly for its narrating of the 'close comrades' debacle, which beggars belief.

   
   

   Posted: 7 months #
4. Helen
   Member

   Thank you. Much obliged. I remember how his death prickled at me in my teen coma, it led to me doing that unheard of thing, bearding my parents and demanding that they explain it to me. I still remember my father sighing and saying "It seems it really was suicide in this case."

   
   

   Posted: 7 months #
5. Kelwyn Sole
   Member

   It surprises me, in retrospect, how strong the emotions are that are left over from that time. e.g. in the book are pics of people I really loved, and people I detested, at times standing right next to each other. And it was all based on political views and, often, affiliation.
   Plus fresh anger, almost forgotten, at the SP. Those ^&%!! got off lightly - they should have been hung upside-down from lampposts. Arthur Benoni Cronwright. I wonder what happened to the %$#@!!8!?

   
   

   Posted: 7 months #

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