DYING FOR FREEDOM, political martyrdom in South Africa

152pp., paperback, Polity Press, Cambridge & Hoboken, 2024

ISBN: 9781509561087

"What happens when death becomes the absolute marker of one’s devotion to autonomy so that, as Biko said, you are either free or dead? Or when a 'liberty or death' code governs struggles for liberation? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when dignity and honor might be more important than life itself? Or when individuals see death as the only shield against dishonour? Dying for Freedom explores these questions by drawing on evidence from South Africa to show how conflicting notions of sacrifice marked campaigns for racial equality in that country, and how this led to a veneration of mortality as proof of the will to freedom. The books argues that this investment in death encouraged a masculinist style of politics in which activists understood fighting for emancipation as a struggle for manhood." from the introduction

“In this clear-eyed book Jacob Dlamini explores the roots of anti-apartheid passion, showing how activists made their commitment into a matter of life and death. At once sweeping and intimate, this profound work of history allows us to look again at martyrdom: as a political purpose that shaped people’s vocations, as an orientation around which a movement cohered, as a tragedy that deprived families and communities of much-loved people. This little book is full of profound insight, and I hope that it will lend to its readers a new understanding of how much the struggle against apartheid cost." Derek Peterson, University of Michigan

Jacob Dlamini is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University. He is the author of Native Nostalgia,  Askari: a story of collaboration and betrayal in the anti-apartheid struggle, The Terrorist Album: apartheid's insurgents, collaborators and the security police.