Learning from the prophets of the past

“THOSE who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Even if these are the only words of Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana that ever get quoted, they remain hauntingly poignant.

When we see in South Africa examples under a democratic government of the kind of state violence, exclusion of the poor, blatant corruption and segregation of communities that were supposed to end in 1994, we might turn to this famous quote.

But we can also look back to the past to draw on inspiring examples of how we can respond to injustice. By coincidence, two biographies