COMMISSIONER
Despite his good pass my brother refused to study further, thus ending his ambition to become a doctor, but became fully involved in community issues.  This inevitably involved politics.  He fully identified with the black students protests against the teaching in the medium of Afrikaans which culminated in the 1976 student uprising.  He saw that attempts to get the white government to change were futile.  He often told me that a nation that continued year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift was fast approaching spiritual death.  He now began to talk in terms of a just war, and he was now inextricably involved in politics.  He would bring banned books home, books on Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King, Chekhova, and so on.  In fact my own political enlightenment came from reading these books.   (Inaudible) ... Merewent Ratepayers Association, Merewent Ex-Students Society, Merewent Community Centre, Merewent Bus Passengers Association, the Natal Indian Congress, and also in the production of a community newspaper called The Sentinel, which had a strong political slant, evoking community consciousness on issues such as the bread price, workers' problems, etcetera.  He also did a great deal of social work with families of exiles and detainees.