Brock, Hannah

Speaking on the first day of a conference of grassroots antimilitarist campaigners, poet and indigenous Khoisan activist Zenzile Khoisan told us: ‘I was one of those people dodging bullets outside this building as a 13-year-old in 1976’. The building was the City Hall, an imposing colonial-era edifice on Cape Town’s grand parade.

Speaking 20 years after South Africa’s first democratic election, Khoisan told the War Resisters’ International (WRI) gathering stories of his…