Local Context • 1977 • IV
Helen Zille, political correspondent for the Rand Daily Mail, obtains concrete proof of a police cover-up. She and editor Allister Sparks were represented at the subsequent quasi-juridical Press Council by leading defence lawyer Sydney Kentridge (father of William Kentridge), but the two were nonetheless found guilty of "tendentious reporting." Zille and Sparks resign after the paper's owners, Anglo American, demand that equal rights rhetoric should be toned down.
An entry from the timeline included in the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance (2009–2010) at the Iziko National Gallery, which proposed connections between art production in South Africa and abroad against the social and political contexts that framed them. A revised version of this timeline was later featured in the retroactive Flight Paths (2011) exhibition guide commissioned by Clare Butcher.