General Magnus André de Merindol Malan was a South African military figure and politician during the last years of apartheid in South Africa. He served respectively as Minister of Defence in the cabinet of President P. W. Botha, Chief of the South African Defence Force (SADF), and Chief of the South African Army. Rising quickly through the lower ranks, he was appointed to strategic command positions. His tenure as chief of the defence force saw it increase in size, efficiency and capabilities.
Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool, is a public Afrikaans medium high school for boys situated in the suburb of Elandspoort in Pretoria in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The school was founded in 1920 by Jan Joubert and reverend Chris Neethling.
Nomaindiya Mfeketo is a South African politician who served as South African Ambassador to the United States from 2020 to 2023, Minister of Human Settlements from 2018 to 2019, Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of South Africa from 2009 to 2014, and mayor of Cape Town from 1998 to 2000 and again from 2002 to 2006.
Mosiuoa Gerard Patrick Lekota is a South African anti-Apartheid revolutionary for the African National Congress (ANC) who served jail time with Nelson Mandela from 1985 and who left the ANC to form the Congress of the People (Cope) splinter party in 2008. He has served as its President since 16 December 2008.
Eugene Alexander de Kock is a former South African Police colonel, torturer, and assassin, active under the apartheid government. Nicknamed "Prime Evil" by the press, De Kock was the commanding officer of C10, a counterinsurgency unit of the SAP that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered numerous accused terrorists from the 1980s to the early 1990s. C10's victims included members of the African National Congress.
Vlakplaas is a farm 20 km west of Pretoria that served as the headquarters of counterinsurgency unit C1 of the Security Branch of the apartheid-era South African Police. Though officially called Section C1, the unit itself also became known as Vlakplaas. Established in 1979, by 1990 it had grown from a small unit of five policemen and about fifteen askaris to a unit of nine squads.
The South African Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), was a government-sponsored death squad, during the apartheid era. The CCB, operated under the authority of Defence Minister General Magnus Malan. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee pronounced the CCB guilty of numerous killings, and suspected more killings.
Dirk Coetzee was co-founder and commander of the covert South African Security Police unit based at Vlakplaas. He and his colleagues were involved in a number of extrajudicial killings including that of Griffiths Mxenge. Coetzee publicly revealed the existence of the Vlakplaas death squads in 1989, making himself a target of a failed assassination attempt.
General Lothar Paul Neethling was chief deputy commissioner (second-in-command) of the South African Police in the apartheid era.
Jacques Pauw is a South African investigative journalist who was an executive producer of the Special Assignment current affairs programme on SABC. Pauw was a founding member and assistant editor of the anti-apartheid Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad. He began his television career in 1994, specializing in documentaries around the African continent.
The Congress of the People (COPE) is a South African political party formed in 2008 by former members of the African National Congress (ANC). The party was founded by former ANC members Mosiuoa Lekota, Mbhazima Shilowa and Mluleki George to contest the 2009 general election. The party was announced following a national convention held in Sandton on 1 November 2008, and was founded at a congress held in Bloemfontein on 16 December 2008. The name echoes the 1955 Congress of the People at which the Freedom Charter was adopted by the ANC and other parties, a name strongly contested by the ANC in a legal move dismissed by the Pretoria High Court.
Max du Preez is a South African author, columnist and documentary filmmaker and was the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad. Vrye Weekblad Online or Vrye Weekblad II was launched on 5 April 2019 again with Max du Preez as editor.
Loslyf is a South African Afrikaans-language pornographic magazine. The magazine was founded in 1995 by J.T. Publishing, a South African subsidiary of the American Hustler. It was the first Afrikaans-language pornographic publication. Launched only one year after the end of apartheid, the magazine was greatly controversial as it posed a clear opposition to the conservative Afrikaner nationalist morals that influenced the apartheid government's censorship of media
Butana Almond Nofomela is a former South African security policeman. On 19 October 1989, hours before he was scheduled to be executed for an unrelated non-political murder, Nofomela confessed to his involvement in a police assassination squad that killed and terrorized opponents of apartheid. Nofomela was granted a stay of execution so he could give more information. His death sentence for the unrelated murder was commuted to life imprisonment and he was released on parole in 2009.
Ntombikayise (Ntombi) Priscilla Kubheka is a former South African anti-apartheid activist and a member of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe. She died at the age of 41 in 1987 after being abducted and interrogated by the South African security forces due to her role as a co-ordinator for Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Kubheka's death was highly disputed during the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which South African Police officials originally claimed they were not responsible for her death. Her body was exhumed in May 1997, near KwaDukuza, revealing that Kubheka had died of gunshot wounds.
Barry Roux SC is a South African lawyer who was admitted to the bar in 1982. His practice covers criminal, insurance, delictual, aviation, matrimonial, medical negligence, general contractual and liquidation work. He served as the defence advocate in the trial of Oscar Pistorius.
The Dakar Conference was a historic conference between members of the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa (IDASA) and the African National Congress (ANC). It was held in Dakar, Senegal between 9 and 12 July 1987. The conference discussed topics such as strategies for bringing fundamental change in South Africa, national unity, structures of the government and the future of the economy in a free South Africa. The IDASA delegation from South Africa, participated in the conference in their private capacity and would later be condemned by the South African government for meeting a banned organization. The future indirect result of the conference was South African government talks with Nelson Mandela and his eventual meeting with P. W. Botha in 1989.
The Security Branch of the South African Police, established in 1947 as the Special Branch, was the security police apparatus of the apartheid state in South Africa. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was one of the three main state entities responsible for intelligence gathering, the others being the Bureau for State Security and the Military Intelligence division of the South African Defence Force. In 1987, at its peak, the Security Branch accounted for only thirteen percent of police personnel, but it wielded great influence as the "elite" service of the police.
Glory Lefoshie Sedibe, popularly known as Comrade September, was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and a senior Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operative who in August 1986 was abducted by an Apartheid police death squad led by Eugene de Kock. After being severely tortured while detained in Piet Retief, Sedibe agreed to inform on his ANC comrades, becoming an askari or enemy agent and murdered his own comrades in Vlakplaas with De Kock and others for the Apartheid state. He was a very prominent ANC activist in exile who went by the noms de guerre Comrade September, Lucky Seme and Wally Williams and was also nicknamed Dois M and Sebata.
