DEATH IN PRETORIA, untold stories of political activists executed during apartheid

322pp, b/w & colour illus., paperback, Penguin Books, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9781776391875

Between 1960 and 1989 in South Africa, more than 130 people were executed for political "offences". The author conducted extensive interviews with the families left behind, as well as fellow activists, lawyers on both sides, judges who passed sentence, warders on death row, and functionaries who informed the condemned of their fate.

"You could say that Peter Auf der Heyde is metaphorically resurrecting ghosts of the past in taking us back to the lives of persons who were judicially executed under apartheid and their families through his meticulously researched and compassionately written Death in Pretoria." Thuli Madonsela, former Public Protector of South Africa and Chair in Social Justice at Stellenbosch University

"Peter Auf der Heyde's painful, scrupulous journey into the past unearths a history that needed to be told. He offers us the fruits of his prodigious research with dignity, with honesty, and with respect for the living and the dead." Jonny Steinberg, Department of Political Science, Yale University and author of Winnie and Nelson: A portrait of a marriage

South African journalist Peter Auf der Heyde teaches sports journalism in the Department of Film and Media at Southhampton Solent University and is a senior research associate at the Centre for Sociological Research and Practice at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Has Anybody Got a Whistle? A football reporter in Africa.