For Amin Cajee travelling into the rural districts to collect demands was a case of going back to his roots. Cajee, a veteran executive member of the Transvaal Indian Congress, was born in Schweizer-Reinecke. The same far Western Transvaal town was the birthplace, as Cajee proudly informs us, of one of the Rivonia trialists currently serving a life sentence in prison.

Cajee: Kathy [Ahmed Kathrada] and I are homeboys, we both from Schweizer.

Amin Cajee himself has had his taste of jails. In 1947 he travelled down to Durban, to participate in the Passive Resistance campaign. He was arrested and sentenced to 30 days.

Cajee: I was sent to Durban Central to break stones. You sit on one stone and put another big stone in front of you. They give you a two-and-a-half pound hammer, and then you break the stone into little pebbles. They used the pebbles on the station platforms. I believe the Railways used to pay the Prisons two shillings per prisoner per day – hmm! – for the stones.

As we finish off for the day, they used to have this business of tausa. You know, you strip yourself completely. You show your mouth first, open wide. Then you jump in the air, show your backside for the phoyisa [police] who is standing there. To make sure you are not smuggling anything back to the cells.

After a few days we refused to do this. We went on a hunger strike, five of us … .

And Cajee's story continues.

During the Defiance Campaign he travelled back to his birthplace in the Western Transvaal.

Cajee: We went to Schweizer-Reinecke and to Vryburg. The late Babla Saloojee [who died in detention], myself, and Mosey Moolla. At Vryburg, we went to the African location there. A municipal cop tells us: “Go to such and such a place, don't go there, there that a bladdy policeman.” A municipal cop tells us! In no time, in less than an hour, we got 40 volunteers. That very night they defied. There, nine o’clock they ring the bell, and Africans got to go out of the town for the curfew. They defied that.