The crime which went away

by David Hemson, The Mail & Guardian

Early in 1968 the apartheid government decreed that African people in and around the community at Maria Ratschitz mission near Ladysmith were to be forcibly removed and dumped on barren exposed land called at Limehill. This was not the first or the last of the forced removals characteristic of the apartheid regime's determination to deny towns and cities to the African people and instead to constitute black political entities, "homelands", on the remaining land occupied by Africans.

“For sure you are going to die!”: Political participation and the comrade movement in Inanda, Kwazulu‐Natal

by David Hemson, 1996

The study of Inanda comrades is one of a movement forcibly excluded from the official society of late apartheid and from political participation in the institutions of power: as an insurrectionary grouping the movement was dedicated to initiating and expanding resistance and seizing on the national strivings for power to force an entry into the political realm. By such compelling interference in the politics of apartheid they attempted to destroy it. The movement provides an indication of political participation of an entirely different order from that of voting and conventional politics; in being prepared to sacrifice their lives, the comrades created a local political culture themselves.