The apartheid regime has tried to wipe out all memory of the mass struggles of the 1950s. Leading political organisations of the time have been outlawed. Leaders and ordinary people have been jailed or been forced into exile; others were killed. Some have been banned or listed, their words, their memories becoming unquotable. Books, pamphlets, posters, badges, flags were seized in numerous police raids, or were censored into silence. Years of campaigning, mass struggles involving millions of people, all of these the system has tried to cast into permanent oblivion.

We, on our side, have comforting words, of course – The people's power is irresistible! Our traditions can never die! These are true enough… . Yes, in their way. But it is never simply guaranteed that the past, our past, this great store of lessons, will be remembered.

Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.

Our search for those who remembered the Freedom Charter campaign took us, and many others who helped, all over South Africa. In Worcester a student from Cape Town spoke to an old African man. He was barefoot, worked as a nightwatchman and lived all alone on the premises of a factory.

“Ja”, said the old man, he remembers the Freedom Charter campaign, he remembers a meeting at Worcester addressed by “a tall thin one, a rooikop with glasses.” We check the records, but we cannot work out who the particular ‘red head’ was. “He told us”, recalls the nightwatchman, “ons moet ‘n Freedom Charter boek maak. “

How many others in our streets, townships, factories, on the buses, remember that huge campaign? We were able to speak to only a few of them. As we learned from them about that period, we also realised we were learning about the lives, the different backgrounds, the incredible experiences, hardships, and above all, bravery of ordinary South Africans.

Here we are in a small, tidy house in one of the African townships outside Cape Town. We are with an old comrade. He was politically active already, way back, in the 1940s.