Frederick John Harris was the only white person to be hanged for a political offence during apartheid.

Born in 1937, teacher and sportsman John Harris, became actively involved in the Liberal Party of South Africa (LPSA) in 1960 and was soon elected to the National Committee. Soon afterwards he also became involved in the South African Nonracial Olympic Committee (Sanroc). As chairman of Sanroc he travelled to Switzerland in 1963 to testify at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), seeking South Africa's exclusion from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics because of its racially discriminatory sports policies. His passport was seized on his return, and a year later he was served with banning orders under the Suppression of Communism Act.

He joined the African Resistance Movement (ARM), a militant anti-apartheid resistance movement founded by members of the LPSA. From its first operation in September 1963 the ARM continued with the bombing of power lines, railroad tracks, roads, bridges and other vulnerable infrastructure until July 1964 without any civilian casualties.

On 24 July 1964 Harris planted the bomb at the Johannesburg train station, killing Ethel Rhys and injuring 23 people. He was arrested, following the confession by one of his colleagues, John Lloyd. Harris was convicted of murder and hanged on 1 April 1965, aged 27.

Activist and photographer Gille De Vlieg was born in England. A trained nurse, she worked in Pietermaritzburg and London before moving to Johannesburg where she became a member of the Black Sash in 1982. Her activism in Black Sash led to her involvement in the Transvaal Rural Action Committee (TRAC), and an introduction into chaotic township lifestyle further inspired her to “show the alternative view of South Africa”, as she came to realise that she could be both activist and photographer.

In 1984, after documenting various “black spots” in the rural Transvaal, she met Afrapix founder member Paul Weinberg who encouraged her to join the collective photo agency and library founded two years earlier. Afrapix brought together a number of photographers who became known for using the camera as a weapon against apartheid. Before 1980, most of these photographers worked independently from each other. With the aim of stimulating documentary photography, Afrapix’s collective approach became one of sharing skills and ideas. Photography generated during this period also became known as ‘struggle photography’. Afrapix was dissolved in 1991 as South Africa’s international isolation ended.

In the late 1980s Gille De Vlieg participated in the Culture in Another South Africa Conference, Amsterdam, and other group exhibitions. In 2009 she exhibited at the National Arts Festival and at the Durban Art Gallery in an exhibition entitled ‘Rising Up Together’. She lives in KwaZulu-Natal.

The Forgotten Voices of the Present started as a research project with the intension to document an alternative history of South Africa’s transition since 1994. This project aims to give voice to those South Africans who have been marginalized and/or excluded from the production of South Africa’s history to date, and thus, attempts not only to challenge the way in which histories of people and communities have been recorded, but generally the way in which histories have been made.

The main purpose of the project is to produce a collection of individual oral histories from residents in selected poor communities that can constitute a meaningful representation of South Africa's post 1994 political, social and economic history as lived and experienced by the oppressed and marginalized majority.

The scope of the project is intentionally limited to collecting oral histories from three selected, poor communities in post-1994 South Africa. It is attempts to capture a representational cross-section of voices from poor communities in post-1994 South Africa that cover rural, urban and peri-urban realities.

The three communites selected for this project are:

The community of Ramalutsi which is located adjacent to the small farming town of Viljoenskroon in the Northern Free State;

The community of Maandagshoek which is located approximately 30kms west of the small town of Burgersfort in the south of Limpopo province;

The community of Sebokeng which is located in the mid-Vaal area (south of Johannesburg) of Gauteng province.

The Department of Education has been hosting an annual oral history competition, known as the Nkosi Albert Luthuli Young Historians’ Competition, since 2006 as part of their commitment to participate in and co-ordinate the national commemoration of the anniversaries of events of historical significance in schools.

Each year all schools are encouraged to participate and the competition is open to all learners in Grades 8 to 11 and all history educators in secondary schools.

The aim of this oral history competition is to encourage all learners to develop an understanding, not only of the broad history of South Africa, but also of the richness of the histories of their local communities, and in the process gaining experience in developing important research skills.

This is a joint project between the Department of Education, South African History Online and the South African History Archive.

In 2010 and 2011, the South African History Archives (SAHA), in partnership with Tshepo Moloi, Gille De Vlieg, Mmatjatji Malabela, Nonhlanhla Ngwenya and Lucky Zimba conducted a research project entitled "Voices from Below: An Oral and Photographic Community History of Tembisa". The objectives of the project is: to conduct community workshops in Tembisa to collect 'voices from below' oral histories, with supporting photographic components, about the quotidian life in Tembisa. Also to create an oral and photographioc archive at SAHA on the hitory of Tembisa as well as to promote awareness of this archive through preparation of a popular publication and physical and virtual exhibitions.

The Mafela Trust organisation was established in 1989 by a group of freedom fighters of the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) to research and document the political and military activities of ZAPU and its armed wing, the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZPRA), during the liberation war in Zimbabwe. Records pertaining to ZAPU and ZPRA history, including war records, were confiscated by the government-led Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in 1982 during the post-independence struggle, and never returned.

In the absence of a documented history, the Mafela Trust has been guided by their mission statement "When you go home tell them of us and say for your tomorrow we gave our today", to launch numerous national projects in an attempt to recoup what has been lost. Most notable of these projects are the 'Fallen Heroes' project - an identification and commemoration of those who died during the liberation war, and the ‘War Graves’ project – the location and subsequent exhumation of war graves. Further research and oral history projects bear testament to the Mafela Trust's determination to recover the ZAPU/ZPRA history, including documenting the history around the formal alliance with Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

The materials produced as part of these projects form the bulk of the Mafela Trust collection at SAHA and include paper-based and digital materials, photographs, oral history interviews and video material. These materials were identified as endangered in the course of a research, digitisation and oral history project conducted by SAHA in 2010 and 2011, and the materials were relocated to Johannesburg in 2011 for comprehensive archival processing. A selection of materials in this collection has been digitised.

ANC - African National Congress

MK - Umkhonto we Sizwe

MOU - Memorandum of Understanding

MWHA - Matopo World Heritage Area

RSA - Republic of South Africa

ZANU - Zimbabwe African National Union

ZAPU - Zimbabwe African People's Union

ZPRA - Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army

AMSA - ArcelorMittal South Africa

CER - The Centre for Environmental Rights

VEJA - Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance

The Centre for Environmental Rights (CER) is a non-profit company and law clinic based in Cape Town. Established in October 2009 by eight civil society organisations (CSOs) in South Africa’s environmental and environmental justice sector, the CER provides legal and related support to environmental CSOs and communities.

This collection relates to CER's work in promoting transparency and accountability in environmental governance, aimed at testing and assessing the extent to which civil society can access environmental information held by regulators and private entities.

Many of the records included in this collection were released to CER and / or CER partner organisations in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 (PAIA), such as the Vanderbijlpark Environmental Master Plan, developed by ISCOR from 2000 to 2002 and released by ArcelorMittal South Africa (AMSA) to the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA) in 2014 after the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) ordered AMSA to do so. The SCA judgment confirmed VEJA’s constitutional right to know the extent and impact of the steel giant’s activities on the Vaal communities’ health and the environment.

The aim of this collection is to establish a proper archive for CER’s third party documents and the next series of documents will include Eskom licences, compliance reports and health studies.

A persistent yet inaccurate myth prevails in South Africa that all of the apartheid state’s records were destroyed. This is not the case, in fact a vast collection of apartheid-era material remains locked away in public and private archives. Between 2012 and 2017, Open Secrets engaged in research in archives across the world in search of the lost stories of apartheid era economic crime. During this period, we collected approximately 40,000 documents in 25 public archives, consulting numerous collections in seven countries including South Africa, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. This material provided the backbone of the publication Apartheid Guns & Money: A Tale of Profit, authored by Hennie van Vuuren and published by Jacana in May 2017. The book, informed by the often newly declassified material found in this archive, tells a tale of global complicity with apartheid. It identifies a global covert network of banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies and politicians that supported apartheid through weapons and oil sanctions busting.

The bulk of the findings in the book, and the material now in this archive are from South African public archives. In mid-2013, 48 Promotion of Access to Information (PAIA) requests were lodged with state agencies in terms of PAIA. Most of these documents date from the period 1978–94 and included TRC-related investigations (from the late 1990s). Most requests were ignored or refused on flimsy grounds. It was thanks to the persistence of The South African History Archive (SAHA), assisted by lawyers from Lawyers for Human Rights and pro-bono counsel from Geoff Budlender, Nasreen Rajab-Budlender, Nyoko Muvangua, Hermione Cronje, Lebogang Kutumela and Frances Hobden, that some departments finally (though only partly) relented, and provided access to this information. Much of it has been untouched by South African researchers. It’s a rich vein of material that demands our attention as we come to understand our story.

Where at all possible, the archives provided here include some of Open Secrets’ summaries of the documents contained there. All inventories, finding aids, and lists of folders requested are included wherever these are available.

ABET - Adult Basic Education and Training

APDUSA - African People's Democratic Union of Southern Africa

CAC - Coloured Advisory Council

CAPS - Curriculum Assessments Policy Statements

CASS - Continuous Assessment

CDE - Centre for Development and Enterprise

CODESA - Convention for a Democratic South Africa

CRC - Coloured Representative Council

CTMWA - Cape Town Municipal Workers' Association

CTPA - Cape Teachers' Professional Association

ELRC - Education Labour Relations Council

ESST - Educational Support Services Trust

FET - Further Education and Training

GATT - General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

Gear - Growth, Employment and Redistribution

IMF - International Monetary Fund

Nedlac - National Economic Development and Labour Council

Nepad - New Partnership for Africa's Development

NEPI - National Education Policy Investigation

NEUM - Non-European Unity Movement

NQF - National Qualifications Framework

NUM - New Unity Movement

NUPSAW - National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers

OBE - Outcomes-Based Education

RDP - Reconstruction and Development Programme

TIMSS - Third International Maths and Science Study

TLSA - Teachers' League of South Africa

UDUSA - Union of Democratic University Staff Associations

USSASA - United Schools Sports Association of South Africa

UWC - University of the Western Cape

WB - World Bank

Formed in 1943, the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) was a united front comprising of the All African Convention (AAC), ANTI Coloured Affairs Department (Anti-CAD) and the Anti-Segregation Council (ASC). Affiliated to the NEUM were The Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA), The Cape African Teachers Association (CATA), and the Society of Young Africans (SOYA).

Key policies and principles of NEUM constituted:

• The Ten Point Programme of minimum demands

• Policy of non-racialism

• Policy of non-collaboration and the boycott as a weapon of

struggle

• Policy of anti-imperialism

• Emphasis on importance of theory and principled approach to

struggle.

NEUM publications, such as the Ten Point Programme, Declaration to the People of South Africa and Declaration to the People of the World, The Torch Newspaper, as well as pamphlets, conference papers and Bulletins were used as a vehicle to propagate these policies and principles. A number of these publications are contained in this collection.

By 1958 the NEUM had split into two sections:

• The African Peoples Democratic Union of South Africa

(APDUSA)

was formed in 1961 under the leadership of IB Tabata who

went into exile and formed the Unity Movement of South Africa

(UMSA).

• Supporters of the leadership of the second section continued

operating in organisations like the TLSA, the Federation of

Cape Civic Associations (FCCA), a number of Educational

Fellowships and in the South African Council on Sport

(SACOS).

As the result of state repression NEUM ceased to exist by the 1960’s by which time nearly the entire leadership and its affiliates, including the editor of the Torch newspaper, were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act.

The New Unity Movement (NUM) was established in 1985 as the successor of NEUM, following a reconciliation between the two opposing sections in the 1980s. NUM continues to be dedicated and committed to the NEUM founding principles and policies.

Source: http://www.newunitymovement.org.za/

In April 1919 the Helping Hand Club for Native Girls was established by a small group of women presided over by Mrs. Clara Bridgman. They purchased a small house in Fairview where there were no restrictions on African residents.

The Club intended to provide domestic Servants working in the District with accommodation as well as instruction and recreation for others. It also attempted to find suitable work for women who resided at the hostel.

In 1930 the Helping Hand committee decided to provide training in domestic service, and atraining school was built. Lessons in cooking, dressmaking, laundry and general housework were given as well as courses in English, reading, arithmatic, first aid and home nursing. After 1940 however, the hostel side of the Club developed increasingly, while the training aspect decreased.

In 1974 the Helping Hand Club changed its constitution. Accordingly, the Helping Hand trust was formed whereby 50% of the Club's funds were to be used for black educational purposes, while the remaining 50% would take the form of donations to other black welfare organisations.

In 1990, R 84 000 was donated to the Department of Bursaries and Scholarships at the Universty of Witwatersrand for black women. The Residue of the Helping Hand Trust Funds, R10, 000 was donated to the Family Planning Association of South Africa.

At the meeting on 20th February 1990 the Helping Hand Trust was finally terminated.