It is quite clear to me that had I never met Steve Biko my life would have taken a completely different course. We met at a time when I had been looking for answers to the challenges facing black people under apartheid. He helped me to find some of those answers to guide me on my route towards liberating myself from racial, mental and spiritual oppression, degradation and exploitation.

I was not the only one searching for higher truths, I belonged to a group of black political soulmates who had discovered other soulmates across the seas, in America – Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seal, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King who fought for the rights of black people, and singers Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin who sang heart-rendingly about the suffering and pain of black people. But they were all far away and we could only meet them in records and in books stolen from the Campus Bookshop near Wits University, which none of us was attending; or the Vanguard Bookshop in the city. We yearned for local heroes. But in the early sixties the apartheid regime had banned, imprisoned and banished men and women who might have played that role and forced others into exile.

Both the African National Congress (ANC) and its rival sister movement, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had been banned, the South African Communist Party (SACP) had been outlawed and the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) was dysfunctional. All we knew and heard of were apartheid government policies and the Bantustan structures and their stooge leaders.

Most of us were living in the black township of Alexandra township (Alex to the locals or Dark City for having no electricity). We would meet at 67 Second Avenue, where I had a small two-roomed house, including a darkroom. I had become a photographer after leaving the trade union movement in protest against government policies, which the Trade Union Council of SA (TUCSA) wanted to adopt. I was secretary general of the Engineering Workers Union, which was dismissed from the federation, a decision that ultimately led to South Africa itself being dismissed from the International Labour Organisation.