ABC Rewind

How South Africa won their freedom from the racist Apartheid regime and the Australians who helped them fight for it.
A new leader emerges in South Africa, a young man with radical ideas. Steve Biko’s ‘black consciousness’ movement inspires a generation.  His murder at the hands of authorities is a moment of reckoning. 
When the children of Soweto township are forced to study in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressor, they rebel and set the country on fire with their resistance. Hundreds of them are killed by the regime. 
Steve Biko’s murder in a prison cell sparks a wave of militant activism, as the government doubles down with more violent raids and arrests. And an Australian diplomat gets swept up in the conflict.

By the 1970s the anti-apartheid movement is growing around the world as protesters find ways to hit the South African government where it hurts most. In Australia, the action takes place in a very public way, by heading onto the sports field.
Seven former Wallabies rugby players refuse to compete against the South African Springboks when they tour Australia. As mass protests divide the country, Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen declares a state of emergency in Queensland. First Nations activists join the fight, and even Aussie cricket legend Sir Donald Bradman gets caught up in the action.

How South Africans won their freedom from the racist Apartheid regime and the Australians who helped them fight for it.
It’s 1990 and Sisonke Msimang is glued to the TV, watching Nelson Mandela, the world’s most famous political prisoner, walk free after 27 years. She’s weeping with joy for a country she knows and loves but has never seen.
Since 1948 South Africans have been divided along race lines, called Apartheid. Blacks, Indians and ‘coloured’ people are separated from white people, and cannot marry them, earn the same wage, or get the same education as whites. Blacks are simply cheap labour for the mines and for rich white families. Then in 1960 police open fire on a protest in Sharpeville, killing 69 blacks. This is a turning point: world leaders condemn the massacre, and inside South Africa, the resistance movement galvanises.
Sisonke’s dad Mavuso is a rebellious young man and dedicates his life to fighting for the freedom of his people. This commitment takes him all the way to Russia and an uncertain future.

How South Africans fought to win their freedom, and the Australians who helped them fight for it.
It's 1990, and the world is watching as Nelson Mandela walks free from his prison cell after 27 years.
The global movement to end the racist policy of Apartheid in South Africa is finally on the brink of victory.
Host Sisonke Msimang grew up in a family of South African freedom fighters, and in this series, she talks to South Africans who risked their lives in the struggle to end apartheid. She also meets Australians who used sport, culture, alongside boycotts and sanctions to bring South Africa to its knees.
This is a story of hope in unsettled times, a story about the power of collective struggle to change the course of history.

In the summer of 1978, Australian narcotics agents intercepted a campervan being unloaded on the Melbourne docks. What they discovered inside the van turned out to be the largest haul of an illicit substance, black hashish, to land on Australian soil at the time. The campervan belonged to two elderly American women tourists, whose overseas holiday odyssey quickly spiralled into a hellish nightmare.