When Rhodes University vice-chancellor Dr Saleem Badat promised veteran struggle stalwart Helen Joseph he would write a book about 160 “forgotten” South Africans banished by the apartheid government to remote parts of the country he never realised it would take 30 years to complete, writes Daily Dispatch Port Alfred bureau head David MacGregor.
In 2001, in Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth, Dumisa Ntsebeza and Terry Bell complained that ‘like so much of South Africa’s recent brutal history, we shall probably never know exactly how many people were banished and what happened to all of them’.
Over the next couple of decades the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) has the potential to propel science and South Africa into the universal age.