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Join Audrey Brown and Kevin Ochieng Okoth for a discussion on the legacy of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa and its significance today.
Celebrating the life and work of South African journalist Lionel Morrison, the author of Footprints: A Black Journalist’s Fight Against Apartheid in South Africa and in Exile, and marking Black History Month in Britain and Ireland, this conversation will explore Morrison’s lifelong commitment to the anti-Apartheid struggle and a politics of anti-racism, internationalism, and Pan-Africanism.
Apartheid in South Africa was arbitrary and ferocious: a brutal system of structural racism and inequality. Its end - now over 30 years ago - was celebrated around the world as a triumph and a gigantic step for Black liberation. In this conversation, our speakers will examine the cruel realities of the Apartheid system; the impact on individuals, South African society, and across the continent; and the legacy of the global campaign against it.
This event is organised by Haymarket Books and The Anti-Apartheid Legacy Trust and Centre of Memory and Learning. Based in the former London headquarters of the African National Congress, the Anti-Apartheid Legacy Centre will open in 2027 as a space for exploring the history and enduring legacy of the international struggle against apartheid.
Reminder that readers in Britain and Ireland can purchase get at least 40% off Footprints and all Haymarket titles on Black Liberation through the month of October for Black History Month.
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Audrey Brown is a South African journalist and cultural curator who has lived and worked in London since 2005. She grew up in the township of Kliptown, during the turbulent, dying days of apartheid and cut her journalist teeth on the emerging progressive press of the era namely: the then Weekly Mail and Vrye Weekblad. She obtained a degree in Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and furthered her post graduate at the University of Wales, College at Cardiff, completing her Masters degree in Journalism.
The dazzling opportunity to work on the BBC World Service brought her to London, where she became one of the best known presenters of news programmes like Focus on Africa, The Africa Debate, The Strand and Network Africa. Before she left South Africa, Audrey had served as a curator at The Women's Jail, a major post apartheid project documenting the experiences of women during the apartheid era. The jail is on Constitution Hill, alongside South Africa's highest court.
Audrey has studied documentary film making at the Varan Institute in Paris and sits on the Board of Chimurenga, a cultural collective that invites critical thinking and writing. She is also a past judge of The Caine Prize for African writing. Audrey's interests and activities are wide and varied. They include hiking up Kilimanjaro, tramping through woods and forests, and wandering through London's many beautiful gardens and squares. She is happiest on air, lost in a book or walking the land.
Kevin Ochieng Okoth is a writer and researcher based in London. He is the author of Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (Verso, 2023) and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He is also an editor at Salvage, a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters, committed to publishing the best radical essays, poems, art and fiction. His writing, research and editorial work seeks to recover twentieth-century anti-colonial thought in order to reanimate it for our present. He is currently working on a book about decolonisation and the Cold War in Kenya.