Apartheid and After: three generations tell their story...

In 1994, four years after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa.


Two years after this date Veronica Scarisbrick went on a Unicef sponsored fact-finding mission to this nation and produced a series of programmes by the title of ‘Apartheid and After’.


In the final part of this archive series you can hear the testimonies of three different generations of black South Africans speaking about their personal experience of apartheid and after.


It was 1996 then, when Veronica spoke to Peter Dadla a 58 year old man from Soweto who struggled against apartheid all his life.To Pinky Vilakazi who belongs to that generation of township students that brought the apartheid system to its heel: "..I think apartheid worked very hard on making us feel very dehumanized, very incompetent, just the mere colour of your skin would make you the most hopeless thing on earth...". And to a sixteen year old, Queeneth, who was old enough at the time to know the meaning of apartheid, with an awareness she should forgive but never forget.

In the course of her reporting Veronica also asked a white Marist Brother, Jude Pieterse, who during the era of apartheid, was Principal of one of a whites-only exclusive school as well as Secretary of the South African Bishop's Conference, where the Church had stood in in all this?


Listen to this programme from our very own Vatican Radio archives: