The Secret Thread: Personal journeys beyond apartheid

The Secret Thread: Personal journeys beyond apartheid, published by Unisa Press, South Africa, as part of its Hidden Histories Series, is a social history reflecting on the power of travel.

The book brings together the experiences of some of the more than 300 people who received small grants to travel beyond the barriers created by apartheid, between 1964 and 1994, to see their own and other communities in a different light.

The study tours were made possible by the Christian Fellowship Trust (CFT), co-founded by Dr Beyers Naudé in 1964. The CFT, a ‘legally subversive’ organisation, drove a ‘Trojan Horse’ into the citadel of apartheid theology. The CFT recognised travel as a transforming experience, more powerful than indoctrination. It first enabled ministers of the segregated Dutch Reformed Churches and later individuals from other denominations, other faiths and civil society organisations, to be exposed to situations that questioned everything they had been taught about skin colour as a marker of human worth.

The Secret Thread explores the value of solidarity and the redemptive power of taking responsibility for participation in systems that benefit the few no matter the suffering of the many. It affirms the human need to travel and to know our common history as essential to the pursuit of justice and reconciliation.

Ewing, a London-based journalist, was asked by the UK Anti-Apartheid-Movement (AAM) to visit South Africa undercover in 1988, to report on resistance to apartheid under the State of Emergency. At the request of Dr Naudé, CFT funded the 4-month tour so that it could not be linked to the AAM. Ewing was later commissioned to write The Secret Thread.

Review

http://news.artsmart.co.za/2018/12/the-secret-thread.html

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