Obed Bapela interviewed by David Wiley May 15, 2006 Cape Town, South Africa.
"Each time [the police] came to this house, these parents have run away, so they decided to arrest me and my baby sister." [3:26]
Obed Bapela describes how he and his baby sister were arrested by the police in the middle of the night because his parents had run from the police; they were both unemployed at the time and did not have a stamp from an employer in their passbook.
Born in 1958, Obed Bapela was an organizer in Alexandra, an African township of Johannesburg, from the time of the 1976 student uprisings and through the intense period of repression and the campaign to make the township “ungovernable” in the mid-1980s. He was one of the accused of treason along with trade union activist Moses Mayekiso. He is an African National Congress member of Parliament from the Johannesburg metropolitan area.
