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The Sites of Struggle Collective marked the 75th anniversary of the 1946 passive resistance against racial segregation on Sunday, 13 June at Depot Road Memorial Primary School in Chatsworth.

The campaign was spearheaded by the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses under the leadership of Doctors Monty Naicker and Yusuf Dadoo. It drew international attention to the Ghetto Act which confined people according to race in separate residential areas. Then  African National Congress president Dr AB Xuma was among the leaders who traveled to New York to campaign against the laws two years before the Nationalist Party won the 1948 election on the apartheid ticket.

One of the most significant outcomes was the delegation of India led by Vijayalakshmi Pandit placing the matter before the United Nations. India then became the first country to impose unilateral sanctions against the racist regime. 

Collective spokesperson Zandile Qono whose family was a key part of the 1946 campaign pointed out that the current generation needed to honour the history of the struggle for a non-racial society.  "Our activism must serve as memory against forgetting that people lost their lives,  went to prison, were thrown out of their homes and had their lives destroyed by a racist government," said Qono.

The organisers mounted a photo exhibition of historic images at the Made in Chatsworth community market. Descendants of the resistors including former exile Yogan Moodley whose father went to prison twice in the 1946 campaign lit candles as a flame of hope to strengthen South African democracy and non-racialism.  Ends