Future generations will look back on the events which occurred in eastern Europe in 1989 as a watershed in world history. My wife and I were at Union Theological Seminary in New York at the time. For a few days in September we hosted the Director of the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Rostock, Dr Giinther Hoffman. Hoffman was a member of a group of theologians and philosophers from the German Democratic Republic who were visiting the United States to experience life within a liberal democratic and capitalist society and compare it with their own. Together we watched the news on television each evening. It was the week during which many East Germans were fleeing across the border into Czechoslovakia and then to the West. On two occasions the television coverage of the events taking place in East Germany was juxtaposed with that of mass marches in Cape Town protesting against apartheid. These were the first such protests for many decades which were permitted by the authorities in South Africa.

As South Africans we found the marches no less remarkable than the events taking place in eastern Europe. As we watched their unfolding, we believed that this was the beginning of the end for apartheid; our guest, on the contrary, was confident that the German Democratic government would reform and survive. Yet, whatever our differences of perception, we sensed that the traumatic developments in eastern Europe were historically connected to what was happening in South Africa. This was, indeed, the case as it turned out.