Author Sylvia Neame's study of the development of the national liberation movement in South Africa is in stark contrast to the frequent depictions of the history of the ANC by leading academics as fragmented, fractured and discontinuous. Not only does her analyses disprove the belief that the ANC’s development has been episodic, several of the conclusions drawn point to its essential inner coherence. Crucial to the development of the congress movement was the search for an alliance strategy that would ensure the ANC its central role. Particularly striking, and essentially new, is the depiction of the various alliance partners – including the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Communist Party and the South African Congress of Trade Unions –and their complicated interaction. The research, based on extensive primary and secondary sources including some eighty interviews dating back to the early 1960s, uniquely combines narrative and analysis. The Congress Movement invites the reader to engage in the fascinating development of the national liberation movement in South Africa in its formative period and uncovers its outstanding continuities as well as the considerable range of its methods. Volume 1 traces the unfolding of the congress movement from 1917 and looks at socialist and other forces that played an integral part in its formation. The 1918–20 upsurge, which included an African mineworkers' strike, played a key role in this development and laid the basis in the 1920s for a partnership between the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and the African National Congress.

Author Sylvia Neame's study of the development of the national liberation movement in South Africa is in stark contrast to the frequent depictions of the history of the ANC by leading academics as fragmented, fractured and discontinuous. Not only does her analyses disprove the belief that the ANC’s development has been episodic, several of the conclusions drawn point to its essential inner coherence. Crucial to the development of the congress movement was the search for an alliance strategy that would ensure the ANC its central role. Particularly striking, and essentially new, is the depiction of the various alliance partners – including the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Communist Party and the South African Congress of Trade Unions –and their complicated interaction. The research, based on extensive primary and secondary sources including some eighty interviews dating back to the early 1960s, uniquely combines narrative and analysis. The Congress Movement invites the reader to engage in the fascinating development of the national liberation movement in South Africa in its formative period and uncovers its outstanding continuities as well as the considerable range of its methods. Volume 1 traces the unfolding of the congress movement from 1917 and looks at socialist and other forces that played an integral part in its formation. The 1918–20 upsurge, which included an African mineworkers' strike, played a key role in this development and laid the basis in the 1920s for a partnership between the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and the African National Congress.

The Drama of the Peace Process in South Africa: I look back 30 Years is a rare portrayal of the unfolding of the peace process in South Africa in the second half of the 1980s into the 1990s as it links general historical accounts with personal experience. The author, Sylvia Neame, was a member of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party and combines the view of what she denotes as an outsider (the historian) with that of an insider. The chief historical figures involved in Sylvia’s narrative are the ANC leaders, Nelson Mandela who was serving a life sentence, and Oliver Tambo who led the organisation from exile, but she also indicates her own contribution to the peace process in 'internal papers', addressed to the leadership of the liberation organisations from 1985 to 1990. She makes the point that her efforts were geared specifically to reaching a political solution and not simply a negotiated one that can take place at the end of an extended armed struggle. What adds to the interest of the book is that Sylvia was at the time based in communist East Germany and the theme of German reunification finds its way into the book, including in the diary extracts in Part II. She was, indeed, in a position to experience at close hand two important historical events of the late 20th century and to observe from a strategic location in Central Europe what she believes was the unfolding of a new epoch of world history in which global human problems would come to the fore.

This extraordinary account of imprisonment shows with exacting clarity the awful injustices of the system. Sylvia Neame, activist against apartheid and racism and by profession a historian (see the three-volume, The Congress Movement, HSRC Press, 2015), has not written a classical historical memoir. Rather, this book is a highly personal account, written in an original style. At the same time, it casts a particularly sharp light on the unfolding of a policedominated apartheid system in the 1960s.

The author incorporates some of her experiences in prisons and police stations around the country, including the fabricated trial she faced while imprisoned in Port Elizabeth, one of the many such trials which took place in the Eastern Cape. But her focus is on Barberton Prison. Here she was imprisoned together with a small number of other white women political prisoners, most of whom had stood trial and been sentenced in Johannesburg in 1964–5 for membership to an illegal organisation, the Communist Party. It is a little known story. Not even the progressive party MP Helen Suzman found her way here.

Barberton Prison, a maximum security prison, part of a farm jail complex in the eastern part of what was then known as the Transvaal province, was far from any urban centre. The women were kept in a small space at one end of the prison in extreme isolation under a regime of what can only be called psychological warfare, carried out on the instructions of the ever more powerful (and corrupt) security apparatus. A key concern for the author was the mental and psychological symptoms which emerged in herself and her fellow prisoners and the steps they took to maintain their sanity. It is a narrative partly based on diary entries, written in a minute hand on tissue paper, which escaped the eye of the authorities. Moreover, following her release in April 1967 – she had been altogether incarcerated for some three years – she produced a full script in the space of two or three months. The result is immediacy, spontaneity, authenticity; a story full of searing detail. It is also full of a fighting spirit, pervaded by a sharp intellect, a capacity for fine observation and a sense of humour typical of the women political prisoners at Barberton.

A crucial theme in Sylvia Neame’s account is the question of whether something positive emerged out of her experience and, if so, what exactly it was.