Rhodes University honours Neil Aggett

Beverly Naidoo

A month has passed since Rhodes University launched its Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), but the events remain etched in my mind. I feel hugely privileged to have been invited to Grahamstown to take part in this important 'struggle of memory against forgetting'. This was not about creating an 'icon' out of Neil. He would have hated that.

First Annual Neil Aggett Labour Studies Lecture: Beverley Naidoo

A tale that is a warning & stark reminder

Death of an Idealist — in search of Neil Aggett

by Beverley Naidoo - reviewed by Terry Bell

Ably written and extremely well-researched, this book is much more than the very well told story of the life and tragic death of the young idealist that is its focus. It is at once a warning and stark reminder of the mundane brutishness that can be unleashed when bigotry and power supercede justice; also a reminder to those middle aged and elderly South Africans across the board who, by silence and acquiescence, if not active support, were complicit in the horrors perpetrated in their name.

To younger generations it is also a lesson in history about what was done — and, in many parts of the world is still done — in the proclaimed cause of state security and the preservation of authoritarian law and order. Above all, perhaps, it is the story of the sad waste of human potential on the altar of idealistic belief.

Not Even the Dead

Richard Pithouse

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

And then, despite the fear, I set off

I put my cheek against death's cheek

− Roberto Bolaño, 'Self Portrait at Twenty Years', The Romantic Dogs, 2006

On the 26th of September 1940 Walter Benjamin – a brilliant writer struggling to the point of being short of paper, an intellectual acutely attuned to the poetic, Jewish and, in his own way, communist – found himself, for the second time in his life, in desperate flight from fascism. On the border between Spain and France, with his library lost to the Gestapo in Paris and his way through Spain blocked, he took his own life.

A family’s loss, a country’s painful past

by Sue Grant-Marshall, Business Day

NEIL Aggett, the trade unionist and medical doctor who was tortured to death in 1982 by the apartheid security police, the first white detainee to die at their hands, would not be riding on the gravy train today.

That is the emphatic opinion of his biographer, Beverley Naidoo, who has spent 15 years working on Death of an Idealist: In Search of Neil Aggett (Jonathan Ball).

Chris Nicholson's Talk at the Durban Launch of 'Death of Idealist: In Search of Neil Aggett'

It is indeed a great privilege and honour to be asked to speak at the Durban launch of Beverley Naidoo’s book on Neil Aggett.  It is also somewhat eerie to realize that Neil was born on my elder brother’s birthday and died on mine. Not being into astrology, I will leave that as coincidence.

I intend to be brief and understand my mandate to be an assessment of the book. I will leave the details of the life of Neil to the author and my assessment of the quality of her work means that you are in very good hands.

The short answer to the question of the quality of this book is that it is a magnificent testament to a life and the quality of its writing measures up to this portrayal. The book is a serious academic work of 432 pages and has copious end-notes and a detailed index.

Death of an Idealist: In search of Neil Aggett

Death of an Idealist: In search of Neil Aggett is the story behind the only white detainee to die in custody of apartheid’s security police. A medical doctor who worked most of the week as an unpaid trade union organiser, Neil Aggett’s stark non-materialism, shared by his partner Dr Elizabeth Floyd, aroused police suspicions. When their names appeared on a list of ‘Close Comrades’ prepared for ANC leaders in exile they were among a swathe of union activists detained in 1981.

Beverley Naidoo traces the transformation of the youngest child born to settler parents in Kenya at the height of Mau Mau resistance to colonial rule. The book explores the metamorphosis of a high-achieving, sports-loving white schoolboy into the 28-year-old whose coffin was followed by thousands of workers through Johannesburg to his grave. The extraordinary funeral and the preceding national work stoppage were a watershed for trade union unity.