Former South African president FW de Klerk who died at the age of 85 in Cape Town, was one of only four South Africans to receive the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. De Klerk shared the award with his presidential successor, Nelson Mandela, in 1993 for ending apartheid and helping to create a new South Africa. Following the historic 1994 election, De Klerk became Mandela's deputy. But their rocky relationship saw him quit their Government of National Unity. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission period, De Klerk apologised for the pain and suffering that apartheid had caused, but didn't go far enough for everyone.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, John Perlman, Danny Booysen and the SABC Media Libraries.
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South Africa's last white president, FW de Klerk, who has died at the age of 85 in Cape Town, will be remembered for effectively ending apartheid and paving the way for constitutional negotiations. On the second of February 1990, De Klerk shocked everyone by unbanning anti-apartheid organisations, such as the ANC, and by announcing the release of the world's then-most famous prisoner, Nelson Mandela.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, John Perlman, Danny Booysen and the SABC Media Libraries.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
After a long process to choose a design and construct a building, the new South African Constitutional Court building, the flagship structure of Constitution Hill, was officially opened on 21 March 2004. Judge Albie Sachs gives us a tour of the historic site.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis
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Most people would frown at a casino consortium agreeing to build a museum for its licence. But that’s exactly what Gold Reef City has done with the help of a team of experts. It got its licence and it’s quietly built an impressive apartheid museum on its doorstep in Johannesburg. The museum opened in 2001.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
He was unknown to the Security Police at Vlakplaas near Pretoria until they were told to "make a plan" with him. Several banning orders, long days in detention and a spell on Robben Island had failed to break his spirit and crush his fight against apartheid. He was Griffiths Mxenge, the human rights lawyer who vigorously defended ANC comrades. So they abducted, stabbed and hammered him to death at Umlazi, south of Durban, in November 1981. Fifteen years later, in October 1996, three of Mxengeís awaiting-trial murderers appeared before the Amnesty Committee in Durban. They were Dirk Coetzee, Almond Nofemela and David Tshikalanga. Although they had already broken their oath of silence on the apartheid governmentís death-squads seven years earlier, they had never buried their skeletons.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis and Dumisani Shange, Sally Burdett and Danny Booysen.
Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/worldsright.htm#till
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Additional music: B - Somber Ballads by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Blue Feather - Reunited by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1200068 Artist: http://incompetech.com/
They became known as the Cradock Four: Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli. On the 27th of June 1985, these four men left the small Eastern Cape town of Cradock for a meeting of the United Democratic Front in Port Elizabeth. A few days later, their mutilated and charred bodies were found in the bush outside the city. Convicted Vlakplaas commander Colonel Eugene de Kock recalled that Goniwe's death was "the beginning of the end of apartheid". "Who killed Matthew Goniwe?" was a constant refrain for 13 years until February 1998, when a group of former security policemen finally stepped forward and said: "We killed the Cradock Four."
Credits: Zola Ntutu, Darren Taylor, Thapelo Mokushane, Angie Kapelianis, Sally Burdett and Danny Booysen.
Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/worldsright.htm#cant
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
The media painted him as the arch-villain of the apartheid era and labelled him "Prime Evil". The Truth Commission singled him out as the man who broke the code of silence and forced security policemen to seek amnesty. He was Eugene de Kock, former commander of the Vlakplaas death squad, convicted murderer serving two life sentences and 212 years in jail for apartheid crimes, and amnesty applicant who helped convict former president PW Botha for contempt of the Truth Commission. Eugene de Kock waged war against liberation movements in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola in the seventies and eighties. When he returned home to fight the ANC, he said: "My war is only just starting." At Vlakplaas, the colonel led his men from the front. At various amnesty hearings, the prisoner still refused to abandon them. But for his former masters, the politicians and the generals, Eugene de Kock had only bitter venom.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, Darren Taylor, Sally Burdett and Danny Booysen.
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/worldsright.htm#thousand
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Additional music by Whitesand - Do You Feel What I Feel? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7qA8n9S88&list=RDkQSoW1VnkH4&index=47
The apartheid government’s top-secret Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme sealed the Truth Commission’s investigations into gross human rights abuses on the 31st of July 1998. South Africans and the world listened with disbelief and then shock to a group of doctors who perverted science to entrench white supremacy. Truth Commission Chairperson Desmond Tutu described the public testimony on the programme, code-named Project Coast, as "the worst evidence I’ve ever heard". Some of the apartheid scientists disclosed how they tried to produce a vaccine and a bacterium to sterilise and kill only black people. But the most disturbing allegation was that the apartheid government planned to poison jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela in the eighties.
Credits: Darren Taylor, Angie Kapelianis, Manana Makhanya and Danny Booysen.
Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/slicesright.htm#doctor
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Additional music by Whitesand - Do You Feel What I Feel? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7qA8n9S88&list=RDkQSoW1VnkH4&index=47
One incident that pushed South Africa to the brink of anarchy was the assassination of Communist Party leader Chris Hani. Millions loved him for his role in the ANC's armed wing, his militant speeches against white supremacy and his promise to uplift the poor. For these same reasons, apartheid supporters detested him. And on the 10th of April 1993, he was dead. Polish right-winger Janusz Walus and Conservative Party member Clive Derby-Lewis were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, for murdering Chris Hani. When Derby-Lewis and Walus testified for amnesty in June and August 1997, they were forced to explain why they had gunned down the man who called for peace only four days before his death.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, Darren Taylor, Antjie Samuel, Danny Booysen and the SABC Media Libraries.
Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/worldsright.htm#believe
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
The Truth Commission was a bitter pill to swallow for the family of black consciousness leader Steve Bantu Biko. But it was even harder for them to accept when five former security policemen applied for amnesty in 1997 for "causing" Biko's death 20 years earlier. It seemed as if Biko's killers would finally tell the truth about how he suffered brain damage and died in detention. But when they appeared before the Amnesty Committee in September and December 1997, they again denied "killing" Biko. Harold Snyman, Daantjie Siebert, Rubin Marx, Johan Beneke and Gideon Nieuwoudt maintained that Biko's death was an "accident" for which he had been partly responsible. Darren Taylor Zola Ntutu and report.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, Darren Taylor, Zola Ntutu, Sally Burdett and Danny Booysen.
Transcript: http://www.sabctruth.co.za/sabctruth/worldsright.htm#fatal
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Convicted former president PW Botha was the one crucial apartheid politician who could have shed more light on the official sanctioning of gross human rights violations. Botha chaired the State Security Council from 1978 to 1989. But instead of succumbing to the Truth Commission, Botha chose to face the court system for eight months and lost. George Magistrate Victor Lugaju found Botha guilty of contempt on the 21st of August 1998 for repeatedly ignoring subpoenas to testify in public. Lugaju said Botha’s failure to testify was unlawful, intentional and without sufficient cause. His sentence was a R10 000 fine or one year in jail. An additional 12-month prison sentence was suspended for five years. This is an extract from Botha’s media briefing at the start of his expensive trial in January 1998.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, Darren Taylor, Manana Makhanya, Cobus Bester and Danny Booysen.
From the series South Africa's Human Spirit. Available wherever you find your podcasts.
© SABC 2021. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Additional music by Whitesand - Do You Feel What I Feel? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM7qA8n9S88&list=RDkQSoW1VnkH4&index=47
PW Botha personified apartheid and the old National Party for most South Africans. For eleven years between 1978 and 1989, he ruled the country as prime minister and then president with a wagging index-finger, two States of Emergency and his repressive security forces. Although Botha introduced limited reforms, he failed to cross his own Rubicon by not abolishing apartheid.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis, Anita Visser and the SABC Media Libraries.
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Veteran activist and sociologist, Professor Fatima Meer championed equality and social justice. Under apartheid, she was banned, detained and held in solitary confinement. She also survived an attempted assassination and arson attack on her Durban house.
Credits: Thrishni Subramoney, Dumisani Shange, Angie Kapelianis and the SABC Media Libraries.
© SABC 2020. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Seamus Heaney called her "one of the great guerrillas of the imagination"; the Nobel Committee called her "a magnificent epic writer" and the Independent newspaper says she's "one of the world's greatest writers".
Credits: Angie Kapelianis
© SABC 2020. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
They were warriors, not soldiers. Black South Africans recruited as labourers to serve in World War One under the British flag. But, they weren't allowed to carry arms. Not even their assegais, shields or sticks. And instead of dying in battle, they drowned aboard the SS Mendi at sea. Unknown and forgotten. But, these men was remembered in their own country in 1995 when Queen Elizabeth the Second unveiled a plaque in their honour at Soweto's Avalon Cemetry. This is their story and the story of their children.
Credits: Angie Kapelianis
© SABC 2020. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
Respected political analyst and former official opposition leader, Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert played a key role in South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. He led the former Progressive Federal Party; the official opposition in Parliament; and several meetings with the then-exiled ANC, most notably the 1987 Dakar conference. He viewed himself as a "philosophical anarchist".
Credits: Angie Kapelians, the SABC Media Library and Radio Diaries (USA).
© SABC 2020. No unauthorised use, copying, adaptation or reproduction permitted without prior written consent of the SABC.
