Don’t miss a Jacana Conversation around the new book Apartheid’s Stalingrad: How the Townships of the Eastern Cape Defied the Apartheid War Machine
More about the book!

Did the Eastern Cape resistance mark the beginning of the end of apartheid?

Jacana Media invites you to join Rory Riordan as he discusses his new book Apartheid’s Stalingrad: How the Townships of the Eastern Cape Defied the Apartheid War Machine.

Riordan will be in conversation with Janet Cherry, human rights activist and academic.

Riordan and Cherry will discuss how the people’s resistance through the church, the civic structures and the underground in the townships of Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage in the mid-1980s was instrumental in the demise of apartheid.

Event details

Date: Wednesday 29 March
Time: 18h00
Register here

About the book

The state threw everything it had at these uprisings – and the people stood and fought and fought and stood.

‘And to see so many unsung heroes, Dr Njongwe, Ernest Malgas, Henry Fazzie, Ivy Gcina and others, now clearly placed in the picture of our struggle – this is great.’ – Mkhuseli ‘Khusta’ Jack

‘… for the first time we have a well-researched and comprehensive account of those difficult, terrible and yet wonderful years of the struggle.’ – Nkosinathi Benson Fihla

Rory Riordan founded the Human Rights Trust in 1986 and its magazine Monitor. He worked extensively in the troubled townships of Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage in the late 1980s. He is a former columnist for the Eastern Province Herald.

Janet Cherry is a human rights activistand academic based in Gqeberha. She is Professor of Development Studies atNelson Mandela University. She has a history of human rights and development activism, including current involvement in the climate justice movement. During the liberation struggle in the 1980s she was an activist in the African National Congress, the United Democratic Front and the End Conscription Campaign.