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Tony Hall: Potted political history

Started working as a reporter on the Rand Daily Mail, then joined The Star for five years, from 1959. For a period as ‘African Affairs’ reporter, covering Soweto and Alex, meeting ANC leaders, interviewed Nelson Mandela when in hiding. Covered Alex bus boycott, Special Branch nationwide house raids, Rivonia trial etc.

Joined the Congress of Democrats the day after Sharpeville, March 1961.

Active for five years in the Johannesburg region: meetings, protests, slogan and pamphleteering, political education, fund-raising.

After the Congress of Democrats was banned, I was ‘listed’ as a member of a banned organization, and was no longer allowed to be published, which effectively ended my journalistic career in South Africa.

My wife, also a COD activist, and I decided to leave the country with our three young sons, to work in an independent African country.

We were both South African citizens, but were refused SA passports. We obtained British passports, through my paternal ancestry, and went to Nairobi in newly independent Kenya, where I was offered a job on a national newspaper.

The apartheid government declared us as ‘permanently departing’ South Africa, subject to a large fine and an 18-month jail sentence if we returned.

We began our 26-year exile in February 1964, returning home for the first time after we were unbanned with many hundreds of others, after February 1990, with our SA citizenship restored in 1991.

For many of our exile years we lived and worked in several countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, in India and in the UK, for newspapers, for NGOs, and for the UN.

At times in those years, while working to support our children, I did voluntary work for the ANC and other allied liberation movements, notably Frelimo and MPLA, in hosting leaders and exiles, networking, organising support meetings; and in Tanzania, where I was training editor of the national newspaper under Frene Ginwala, I also did voluntary training of MK cadres in journalism.

In London in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while working on newsmagazines, I served for a period on the ANC London office Information sub-committee in Goodge Street; and in Penton Street I did the editorial production for several issues of Sechaba. After our return to South Africa, I became an active member and donor of the ANC Yeoville branch, and then of the Schagen, Mpumalanga branch

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