“What is happening here,” said Mbuyiseli Songelwa to a British reporter in 1985, “[is that] we are struggling for one municipal vote. One vote, one municipality, which goes with one man, one vote nationally.”

Songelwa, the Komani leader of the Detainees Parent Support Committee made these remarks to a ThamesTV crew. A year later he was dead. At the Truth & Reconciliation Commission over a decade later, his wife Nokuzola would recount the story of two white policemen informing a 13-year-old and a six-year-old “that Mbuyiselo is dead, and they went off in their van”...