Interview Segment

Luli Callinicos interviewed by Jim Sleight
May 28, 2005 Cape Town, South Africa.
"... the truck and the police coming on a rainy day in March to remove people and the ANC's attempt to mobilize people to resist -- it's well-documented -- and the failure of people to resist because they were intimidated ..." [3:58]

Luli Callinicos describes the forced removal from Sophiatown in Johannesburg starting in 1953, the first major forced removal carried out by the apartheid government.

Luli Callinicos is a social historian of South Africa. She was involved from the mid-1970s in writing history for adult Black workers with little formal education. She worked first for the Metal and Allied Workers Union and then for The World newspaper in Johannesburg, which was banned in 1977. She was a founding member of the History Workshop of University of the Witwatersrand and also the Workers’ Library in Johannesburg. She wrote the three-volume People’s History of South Africa, a biography of Oliver Tambo, and other books about South African people's history.

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