South African History Online - SAHO, 349 Albert Road, Cape Town (2026)

28/05/2026

Launch of the South African Domestic Workers' Union (SADWU)

Domestic workers, the overwhelming majority of whom were Black women, were among the most exploited and legally unprotected workers in apartheid South Africa, excluded from the basic labour rights that governed other sectors and subject to the arbitrary authority of individual employers in private homes.

The South African Domestic Workers' Union was founded in 1986 as part of a broader wave of independent trade union organising that sought to extend collective bargaining rights to the most marginalised workers in the country. SADWU's formation was a landmark moment in the history of women's labour organising, asserting that domestic work was work and that those who performed it deserved dignity, a living wage, and the right to organise.

Do you have a family member who worked as a domestic worker or recognise anyone in the image and what do you know of the conditions they faced and the rights they fought for?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Guy Tillim Photographic Collection
Photographer: Guy Tillim

28/05/2026

Today in South African History,28 May

1881
Daniël François Malherbe, South African novelist, poet and dramatist, was born in Dal Josafat, Paarl, in the Western Cape (then Cape Colony). He studied at Victoria College in Stellenbosch before completing a doctorate in Germany, and played a significant role in establishing Afrikaans as a recognised written language, delivering a landmark address in 1906 arguing that Afrikaans was not a dialect but a distinct language. He is best known for his novel Vergeet Niet (1913), regarded as the first Afrikaans novel of artistic value.

1950
A unanimous resolution calling for a National Day of Mourning and Protest was taken at a United Anti-Fascist Rally held in Durban, addressed by ANC President Dr James Moroka. The resolution called for Africans countrywide to stay at home in protest against the Unlawful Organisations Bill, a piece of apartheid legislation widely regarded as targeting Black political organisations. This followed the police killing of 18 protesters in Johannesburg on 1 May 1950.

1980
The schools boycott spread to Black townships across South Africa. The boycott, which had originated in the Cape Peninsula among Coloured students protesting against inferior and racially segregated education, escalated sharply when riot police were called in Durban and Port Elizabeth. At Elsies River near Cape Town, police fired on a group of Coloured youths, killing Bernard Fortuin (15) and William Lubbe (19) and wounding three others. The killings galvanised further protests. A subsequent march drew between 40,000 and 60,000 students and community members. The boycott spread across the Eastern Cape and continued well into 1981.

About SAHO
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history resource dedicated to preserving and promoting South African history for all. Established in 1998, SAHO provides free access to over 60,000 articles, 4,000 biographies, and 450+ timeline events, towards a people's history.

28/05/2026

Portrait of Ai-Ben, Genadendal, South Africa, circa 1947

Genadendal, meaning "Valley of Grace" is one of the oldest mission settlements in South Africa, established by Moravian missionaries in 1738 and home to a predominantly Coloured community whose history spans centuries of labour, displacement, and resilience in the Western Cape. This portrait of Ai-Ben was made by Anne Fischer as part of a collaborative photobook project with writer Dora Taylor, tentatively titled Vale of Grace, which was never published.

Fischer exhibited this and six other photographs of Ai-Ben at the Argus Gallery in Cape Town in late 1947, beneath this image displaying Ai-Ben's own words: "I worked all my life for the Witmense. They give me 30/- a month pension. Do you know, I can hardly see."

Do you have family connections to Genadendal or the mission communities of the Western Cape — and whose stories from that world have been passed down to you?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Iziko Museums of South Africa, Social History Collections and University of Cape Town Library Special Collections
Photographer: Anne Fischer

28/05/2026

Ahmed Timol and Suliman Sujee, Johannesburg, circa 1960s

Ahmed Timol was a South African Indian teacher and ANC and SACP underground operative from Roodepoort who was arrested by the Security Branch in October 1971 and died in detention at John Vorster Square, Johannesburg. The apartheid state claimed he jumped from the tenth floor a verdict accepted by a 1972 inquest. Decades of campaigning by his family led to a reopened inquest in 2017, in which Judge Billy Mothle overturned the original finding and ruled that Timol had been murdered. His case became one of the most important legal challenges to the apartheid state's long history of covering up deaths in detention, and contributed to renewed calls for accountability for crimes committed by the security forces.

Do you know the story of Ahmed Timol and what does the decades-long fight by his family for truth and justice mean to you?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Courtesy the Ahmed Timol Family Trust
Photographer: Unknown(If you know who might have taken this image, please share in the comments)

28/05/2026

Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer at Pre-Election Negotiations, Kempton Park, South Africa

The multi-party negotiations held at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park between 1991 and 1993 were the formal mechanism through which apartheid South Africa was dismantled and a democratic constitutional framework agreed upon. Cyril Ramaphosa led the ANC's negotiating team while Roelf Meyer served as the National Party government's chief negotiator, the two men developing a working relationship that became central to keeping the process on track through repeated crises, including the assassination of Chris Hani in April 1993. The negotiations produced the Interim Constitution and the agreement to hold South Africa's first democratic elections on 27 April 1994.

What do you remember of the negotiation period and how did communities around you experience the uncertainty and hope of those years between 1990 and 1994?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: University of Cape Town Libraries
Photographer: Louise Gubb

28/05/2026

Photographer at Work, Cape Town, South Africa, circa 1940s

Street and itinerant photography was a widespread and largely unrecorded practice in South African cities and townships from the early twentieth century, offering communities access to portraiture outside formal studio settings.

Working with painted backdrops that referenced European domestic interiors, a visual language of aspiration and respectability. Street photographers produced images that families treasured, displayed, and passed between households as records of identity and kinship. As historian and theorist John Peffer has argued, these popular photographic practices constituted a rich image world largely invisible to mainstream art historical accounts of South African photography, yet central to how communities constructed and preserved their own visual histories.

Do you have photographs taken by a street or community photographer in your family's collection or do you know anyone in the photograph?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Iziko Museums of South Africa, Social History Collections and University of Cape Town Library Special Collections
Photographer: Anne Fischer

27/05/2026

Today Is Tomorrow's History, 27 May 2026

Maria McCloy, Cultural Tastemaker and Creative Force of Post-Apartheid South Africa, Dies at 50

On 12 May 2026, South Africa's media and entertainment industry mourned the sudden passing of Maria McCloy — DJ, publicist, fashion designer, journalist, and cultural producer — who died of heart failure at Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg, aged just 50. Born in the UK, McCloy grew up between Sudan, Nigeria, Mozambique and South Africa, where she spent much of her life, cementing her place as a pillar of Johannesburg's creative scene. (RA)
Through Black Rage Productions and Outrageous Records, she helped define what urban black creative life looked and sounded like in democratic South Africa. (Dsac) As a festival publicist, she worked with Afropunk JHB, Bassline Fest, Fête de la Musique, Basha Uhuru, HughFest, FNB Art Joburg, and The Standard Bank Arts Festival, among others. (Youth Village) She also designed footwear and accessories through her eponymous fashion line, sold in Africa Rise, born out of a childhood love for accessories. (News24) Just hours before she died, McCloy gave what would be her final interview on Radio 702 — energetic, reflective, and deeply passionate about African storytelling. (InBound SA)

The record of a life spent building space for others in South African culture is not easily compressed. It is, precisely, the kind of history being made right now.
Who in South Africa's creative industry has shaped our cultural landscape in ways you feel haven't been fully recognised or documented yet?

About SAHO | South African History Online (SAHO) is the largest free-access online resource on South African and African history. Established in 1998, SAHO is trusted by schools, universities, media organisations, and millions of visitors worldwide.

Source: gov.za media-statements: 14 May 2026

27/05/2026

Denis Worrall Supporters at the Helderberg Constituency, 1987 South African General Election

The 1987 whites-only general election was held against the backdrop of a nationwide State of Emergency, township uprisings, and growing international sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Denis Worrall, a former South African ambassador to the United Kingdom, stood as an independent candidate against the National Party in the Helderberg constituency, mounting an unexpectedly strong challenge that rattled the ruling party establishment. His campaign represented a faction of white liberal opposition that sought reform from within the white political system, at a moment when the broader liberation movement, led by the banned ANC and the internal UDF, continued to reject participation in racially exclusive elections as a matter of principle.

What do you remember of the 1987 election and how did white opposition politics at the time appear to communities excluded from the vote?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Guy Tillim Collection
Photographer: Guy Tillim

27/05/2026

Group of Women on Train, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 20th Century

Under apartheid, South Africa's railway system was rigidly racially segregated, with Black passengers confined to separate and consistently inferior carriages, facilities, and platforms. For Black South Africans in the Eastern Cape, trains were nonetheless a vital lifeline connecting rural areas, towns, and cities at a time when movement was heavily controlled by the pass laws. Women in particular relied on public transport to travel between domestic work in urban centres and their families in designated "homelands," making the train a space of both hardship and community.

Do you recognise anyone in this photo and what journeys stand out from your own life or your family's story?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections. Copyright held by the Morolong family.
Photographer: Daniel Morolong

27/05/2026

Moulana Faried Esack Defends ANC Flag at Ashley Kriel's Funeral, Langa Township, Cape Town, July 1987

Ashley Kriel was a twenty-year-old ANC underground operative and youth activist who was shot dead by security police in Athlone, Cape Town, in July 1987, a killing his family and comrades maintained was an assassination carried out in cold blood. The ANC had been banned since 1960, making the display of its flag, colours, or symbols a criminal offence, yet township funerals during the State of Emergency became one of the few spaces where communities could publicly assert their political identity and mourn those killed in the struggle. The apartheid security forces regularly intervened at political funerals to remove ANC symbols and disperse mourners, turning gravesides into confrontation sites.

Do you remember Ashley Kriel or the political funerals of the 1980s and what did those moments of public mourning mean to communities living under the State of Emergency?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Beyond Barricades Exhibition
Photographer: Roger Meintjes

27/05/2026

Mohammed Valli and Supporters at the Start of the Delmas Treason Trial, Delmas, 1985

The Delmas treason trial was one of the most significant political trials of the 1980s, in which twenty-two United Democratic Front and community activists were charged with furthering the aims of the ANC and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government. The UDF, formed in 1983 as a broad internal coalition opposing the tricameral parliament, had rapidly become the most visible face of organised resistance inside South Africa at a time when the ANC remained banned. The Delmas accused included prominent civic and youth leaders from the Vaal Triangle, whose arrest followed the Vaal Uprising of September 1984, and the trial drew sustained international attention to the apartheid government's use of treason charges to suppress legitimate political opposition.

Do you remember the Delmas trial and what did the prosecution of community leaders mean to activists and ordinary people resisting apartheid in the 1980s?

About South African History Online (SAHO)
South African History Online (SAHO) is a non-profit, open-access public history website archive initiative founded in 1998. Our mission is to make South African history accessible to all. SAHO provides free access to trusted historical content used by schools, universities, researchers, media, and the public, reaching millions of readers worldwide each year.

Source: Paul Weinberg Collection
Photographer: Paul Weinberg

South African History Online - SAHO

28/05/2026

28/05/2026

28/05/2026

28/05/2026

28/05/2026

28/05/2026

27/05/2026

27/05/2026

27/05/2026

27/05/2026

27/05/2026

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Organization

Shortcuts

Share

Category