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‘I recruited students – people like you – to set off bombs in the anti-apartheid struggle’
Joana Ramiro speaks to RONNIE KASRILS about a youth spent on subterfuge in the service of South African freedom from oppression

HE HOLDS tightly onto my arm as we return from our interview in a local cafe. We are going to the London Film School for the showing of a documentary he has been lending his name to.

The passers-by, tourists and Christmas shoppers buzzing around Covent Garden may struggle to believe that the man walking beside me is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle and a former commander of the Umkhonto we Sizwe paramilitary forces co-founded by Nelson Mandela. He is Ronnie Kasrils — one of the best recruiters in the African National Congress (ANC).

Kasrils’s visit to London is not just another of his speaking tours. This time he is here to celebrate a story rarely told: how he recruited dozens of young men and women in Britain to join the fight of the ANC in a time when the party was fighting for its life.

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