| |
Content
A listing of transcripts of the dialogue and narrative of this section.
|
Structure
The list provides the transcript, info about the text, and links to references contained in the text.
|
Special Report
Transcripts for Section 7 of Episode 28
| Time | Summary | | | 31:33 | A clear example of the one man’s hero being the other man’s villain. Peter Hain is also such a man. Resented deeply by most white South Africans because he almost single handily launched the sports boycott against apartheid South Africa. Respected by most black South Africans because of his leading role in the anti-apartheid movement in Britain. Hain returned briefly to the country of his birth to ask the Truth Commission to investigate the former government’s dirty tricks abroad, dirty tricks also played on him. | Full Transcript | | 32:06 | Pretoria school boy in the 1960s. Radical socialist branded South Africa’s public enemy number one in the 1970s. Now, in the 1990s, waiting in the wings to lead the British. Peter Hain is a member of parliament and a shadow minister for the labour party in Britain. When the labour party takes over next year as he’s confident they will Hain is likely to be the next minister of employment. Last week Hain handed in a document to the Truth Commission, detailing some of the former government’s dirty tricks abroad. It was also an intimate act which brought to a close his family’s history of pain and protest. | Full Transcript | | 32:53 | My parents were very active in Pretoria as leading liberal anti-apartheid activists. They’d been jailed, they’d been banned. They were the first married couple to be banned. And in fact when they were banned they had to given exceptional permission to communicate with each other as husband and wife because they were the first married people to be banned and the banning provisions stopped you communicate with another banned person. Anyway, things got worse and worse and eventually they stopped my dad working as an architect and we had to leave in March 1966 to go into exile in Britain. | Full Transcript | | 33:24 | Exiled and angry. Hain hurled himself into anti-apartheid activity. He attacked the core of white South Africa’s white identity: sports. // ‘How about rugby? Did you know that that great South African institution was invented by the English back in 1823 and where would Vrystaat be without it? // Sport is part of the way of life English speakers have given South Africa. But they’re a bit difficult to pin down…’ | Full Transcript | | 33:56 | Well, I’d been a sport mad young South African, fanatically into sport: rugby, soccer, cricket, motor racing the lot. And I knew how vital sport was to the maintenance of the white South African psyche and mystique and morale. And so what I came up with as a young political activist getting involved in the whole exciting area in the late sixties, with the Paris student revolt, with the marches and the demonstrations on Vietnam, all of that kind of student radicalism was the idea of using direct action protest, to physically stop South African sports to … which is what we did. Try to do to the Springbok campaign in 1969, ’70 and then we managed to stop the 1970 cricket tour, which was coming to Britain, which hit white South Africa very hard. They didn’t like me for it and that’s why they started calling me ‘public enemy no.1’ and all that kind of thing. I think what hurt them most was that it was one of their own people doing this to them from abroad. | Full Transcript | | 34:52 | ‘In fact matters didn’t end there. In fact, Hain and other anti-apartheid activists triggered off a worldwide vendetta against South African sportsmen’ // Well the sports boycott and my identification with organising it hit them so hard that some response was perhaps inevitable and so I got a letter bomb for example, sent by BOSS the old South African security agency in June 1972, which nearly blew me and my family and our virtual near neighbours out. But which fortunately had a technical fault and was defused by Scotland Yard’s bomb squad. Then of course came the mistaken identity case, so called when I was charged in the most bizarre terms with the theft of €490 of fivers from a branch of Barclays Bank that we previously demonstrated against, a few hundred yards from my home in Putney in south west London. I think there’s a lot of evidence now that the bank theft charge that was put upon me that I was framed up for that. I was eventually acquitted but there’s a lot of ...more | Full Transcript |
|
|
>
