> The author is Paul Trewhela; unfortuantely, the article doesn't seem
> to be available online.
Ah. Paul Trewhela has written about abuses in the ANC prison camps in the past, in the pages of 'Searchlight South Africa' (a journal which was edited by the late South African Trotskyist, Baruch Hirson). A quick search on his name reveals a number of articles in which he is mentioned as a source of information on the situation within the ANC in exile. He reveals himself to be a vociferous anti-Stalinist - a rather important fact, given that Thabo Mbeki was until the 1990s a member of the South African Communist Party, and thus quite familiar with Stalinist though (Mbeki recently described the ANC as a 'democratic centralist' organisation - of course democratic centralist in the Stalinist mould).
As Hirson, and unfortunately all too few others, said - since the left ignored the voices of ANC dissidents and victims of ANC prison camps, these people would end up being embraced by the right. That clearly happened to some extent in the early 1990s in South Africa.
Now that the people like Thabo Mbeki and Manto Tshabala-Msimang (the SA Health minister) are enforcing the same 'discipline' on South Africans as they did on ANC members in exile, the folly in ignoring voices like those of Trewhela is ever more apparent.
Peter P.S. If someone would scan in Trewhela's letter, I'd very much appreciate it. -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844