In March 2015, Gillian Gane came from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend a week at the Alan Paton Centre researching the history of the African Resistance Movement. Dr. Gane herself was a minor member of the ARM, which at the beginning of the 1960s was the first organization in South Africa to move beyond non-violence. “In an underground organization,” Dr. Gane says, “security demands secrecy. So if security works as it should, you don’t know the names of more than a handful of your fellows—it’s a bit like belonging to a community of ghosts.” Half a century after her actual involvement in the ARM, Dr. Gane has returned to the country of her birth to research her own past, which is also the past of a part of the struggle many may not know of. ”We need at this stage to know many struggle stories,” she says,“and we need to look at them with a critical eye.”What makes this possible in the case of the ARM (earlier known as the National Committee for Liberation or NCL) is the Magnus Gunther Collection, which was donated to the APC in 2007. This is surely the most comprehensive collection of documents on this organization anywhere in the world, according to Dr. Gane. She speaks warmly of not only the rich documentary resources at the Alan Paton Centre, but the comfortable amenities and the helpful and knowledgeable assistance of the staff, singling out Nazim Gani for particular gratitude.
