Dying for Change: Revisiting Apartheid South Africa

In the mid-1980s, with South Africa’s apartheid at its height, Mrs Thatcher, the British prime minister, campaigned to prevent the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime on the grounds that sanctions would bring more suffering to South Africa’s Black population. The book is an open letter to Mrs Thatcher, rebutting her apparent support for the apartheid regime and explaining why the country’s Blacks would welcome sanctions. The ‘letter’ draws on many years of anthropological research within South African’s ‘Bantustans’ (homelands), especially supposedly ‘independent’ Bophuthatswana.

Supported by a raft of socio-economic data, the book explains the workings of apartheid’s system of controls in the ‘independent’ Bantustans, notably a fraudulent taxation system which was used by the regime to finance and reward foreign supporters of the apartheid system. These included several MPs, including members of the UK’s Conservative Party, leading European Banks, European Ministers, supposedly ‘independent’ businessmen, including at least one Israeli ‘double agent’, finally gunned down in Moscow, and South’s Africa’s notorious casino industry, whose international expansion was enabled by apartheid.

The book manuscript was ‘lost’ on its way to the publishers in the late 1980s. It was found some 30 years later. The original text is now published with a new Preface and Epilogue and additional footnotes that explain historical features of the apartheid system.