Pick up the spear: making posters for comrades assassinated in the struggle against apartheid

Abstract

From the late 1970s onwards, the apartheid state increasingly made use of targeted assassinations and killed several prominent anti-apartheid activists both within and outside of the country. The regime also conducted “cross-border raids” into all the front-line states – attacks carried out by the South African Defence Force (SADF) that were aimed at destroying both the physical infrastructure of the liberation movements in exile and killing large numbers of resistance fighters. This conversation between Safundi’s visual essays editor, Kylie Thomas and Judy Seidman, poster-maker and activist who worked with the ANC in the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, focuses on posters Seidman made as a member of Medu Art Ensemble in Botswana from 1980 to 1985, in response to the murders of activists assassinated by the apartheid regime.