Reflections on '76: Dr Russell Ally on student life under apartheid

Fifty years after the June 16 Soweto Uprising, Dr Russell Ally reflects on arriving at UCT in 1977, carrying the aftermath of a country in political upheaval. Having witnessed the uprising during his matric year in East London, he entered a university still shaped by apartheid laws that restricted black students through the permit system, forcing many to navigate a divided existence between academic life on campus and political life beyond it. His reflections reveal how the struggle against apartheid was experienced not only through state oppression, but also through the difficult tensions, choices and responsibilities that defined student activism at the time.

Part of UCT's three-part Reflections on '76 , this conversation explores what it meant to study, organise and imagine change in the years after Soweto. 

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