The Cape of Storms: A Personal History of the Crisis in South Africa

Abstract

A white South African born into racial discrimination, Anthony Hazlitt Heard became increasingly aware of the injustice, suffering and contradiction in his native land. Cape of Storms is his highly personal account of the segregationist National Party's rise to power in South Africa and of the human and political consequences of that nation's recent history. As the editor of the Cape Times newspaper for 16 years, he faced prosecution, threats, reader hostility, government pressure and finally arrest for publishing a forbidden interview with Oliver Tambo, banned leader of the outlawed African National Congress. Major political upheavals and everyday life in South Africa are described in this memoir. The story ranges from the author's schoolboy life to the tumult of Sharpeville, Soweto, and the nationwide unrest of 1984-1986. As a working journalist, the author was involved with many of the major events and personalities during these troubled times. With this account, Heard sheds an insider's light on what life is really like in South Africa, why some of its people hold such extreme positions on the question of race, and what may lie ahead in the nation's volatile politics.