Switch off That Machine

A warning for the present and the future, from the past…

The time is apartheid South Africa. The resonance is now.

You will hear, in order of appearance:

Soweto's Imilonji KaNtu Choral Society singing at the enthronement of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, St George's Cathedral, Cape Town;

Archbishop Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner;

An announcer on state-controlled radio;

Beyers Naudé, once a leading pro-apartheid Afrikaner cleric whose radical epiphany after the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960, when police shot and killed 91 peaceful protestors, led to him being 'banned' – with draconian restrictions – by the very apartheid establishment he'd been at the heart of. He followed Desmond Tutu as head of the anti-apartheid South African Council of Churches. Beyers Naudé's ashes are scattered in Alexandra;

P W Botha, then State President, notorious for his uncompromising brutality;

Protestors outside St George's Cathedral;