A Pretoria Boy

Book excerpt: 'A tour de force of an extraordinary half-century of campaigning for justice' – Helen Clark, former New Zealand Prime Minister and United Nations Development Chief Peter Hain – famous for his commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle – has had a dramatic 50-year political career, both in Britain and in his childhood home of South Africa, in an extraordinary journey from Pretoria to the House of Lords. Hain vividly describes the arrest and harassment of his activist parents and their friends in the early 1960s, the hanging of a close family friend, and the Hains' enforced London exile in 1966. After organising militant campaigns in the UK against touring South African rugby and cricket sides, he was dubbed 'Public Enemy Number One' by the South African media. Narrowly escaping jail for disrupting all-white South African sports tours, he was maliciously framed for bank robbery and nearly assassinated by a letter bomb. In 2017–2018 he used British parliamentary privilege to expose looting and money laundering in then President Jacob Zuma's administration, informed by a 'Deep Throat' source. While acknowledging that the ANC government has lost its way, Hain exhorts South Africans to re-embrace Nelson Mandela's vision.