Hugh lewin biography

Born in Lydenburg in , to English missionary parents, Lewin attended Rhodes University before beginning his journalistic career at the Natal Witness in Pietermaritzburg.

Hugh Lewin (3 December – 16 January ) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and writer.

During his years in prison, Lewin secretly recorded his experiences and those of his fellow inmates in the pages of his Bible, and on his release these writings were published in London in as Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison. Hailed as a classic of prison writing, the book remained banned in South Africa for many years, until it was published by David Philip in Lewin spent a decade in exile in London, where he worked as an information officer of the International Defence and Aid Fund and as a journalist for The Observer and The Guardian, followed by another ten years in Zimbabwe, where he became a founding member of the Dambudzo Marechera Trust, before returning to South Africa in He took up the post of director of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg and founded Baobab Press.

In , he was awarded the Olive Schreiner Prize for his memoir, republished in South Africa, with the addition of new material, as Bandiet out of Jail. Hugh Lewin is the man to have faced this with the courage of a fine writer. Unforgettable, invaluable in facing now the ambiguities of our present and future.

Biography: Hugh Lewin () was a.

I used to say that we were standing on holy ground and should metaphorically remove our shoes. In South Africa we are blessed by some truly remarkable people of all races, and each one is a person of extraordinary nobility of spirit. Many were involved in the struggle against apartheid and they paid a very heavy price for that involvement.

One such is Hugh Lewin, whose passionate commitment to justice and freedom led him to oppose injustice and oppression with every fibre of his being. For this he paid a heavy price: seven and a half years of incarceration and twenty-one years in exile. Hugh Lewin went through sheer hell and emerged, not devastated, not broken, and not consumed with bitterness or a lust for revenge.

He amazed, he humbled with his gentleness, his generosity of spirit, his willingness to forgive, when he could have been otherwise, and made a telling contribution to the work of the TRC as a member of its Human Rights Violations Committee.