Green Honoured to Facilitate Launch of Book on Prominent Anti-Apartheid Activist Family

Fazila Farouk

SALDRU’s Pippa Green was honoured to facilitate the discussion at the launch of the book, My Father Died for This by Lukhanyo Calata and Abigail Calata at the Cape Town Central Library. It is an extraordinary family biography that begins with his great-grandfather and early ANC leader, Canon James Calata, and of his father, Fort Calata (so named because the Canon was in the Old Fort Prison during the Treason Trial at the time of his birth).

Fort was one of the Cradock Four, who were brutally murdered by the security police on the road back from PE, one grim night in 1985. It is a story of suffering and grace and love, not least about his mother, Nomonde. It’s about the past but also the future. And of course, about the community of iLingelihle, the township outside Cradock, which was one of the best organised communities during the apartheid era in spite of every attempt by the then government to undermine and terrorise it. It is really worth understanding this past to know where we came from.

Several online publications published excerpts from the book. Read excerpts on Books Live, Huffington Post, The Journalist and the Daily Maverick.

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