Dying for Freedom

What happens when death becomes the ultimate marker of one’s commitment to one’s freedom? What happens when the opposite of freedom is not unfreedom but death, not slavery but mortality? How are we to think of the right to life when a political demand for dignity and honor might be more important than life itself?

Dying for Freedom explores these questions by drawing on archival evidence from South Africa to show how death and conflicting notions of sacrifice dominated the struggle for political equality in that country. This political investment in death as a marker of commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle encouraged a masculinist style of politics in which the fight for freedom was seen and understood by many activists as a struggle literally for manhood. This investment generated a notion of political sacrifice so absolute that anything less than death was rendered suspect. More importantly, it resulted in a hierarchy of death whereby some deaths were more important than others, and where some deaths could be mourned and others not.

This highly original account of the necropolitics of the liberation struggle will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences and to anyone interested in South Africa. Introduction

Chapter 1: Defying Death
Chapter 2: Dead and Proud
Chapter 3: Refusing to Die
Chapter 4: The Unmournable Death
Chapter 5: A Dignified Corpse

Conclusion “In this clear-eyed book Jacob Dlamini explores the roots of anti-apartheid passion, showing how activists made their commitment into a matter of life and death. At once sweeping and intimate, this profound work of history allows us to look again at martyrdom: as a political purpose that shaped people’s vocations, as an orientation around which a movement cohered, as a tragedy that deprived families and communities of much-loved people. This little book is full of profound insight, and I hope that it will lend to its readers a new understanding of how much the struggle against apartheid cost.”
Derek Peterson, University of Michigan Jacob Dlamini is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.