“When we look and reflect on black Wednesday 45 years ago, my disappointment is we haven’t moved. We had a militant apartheid regime coming down, jackboots and all, closing the media, stifling black voices. What we have now is a more subtle way – and maybe unintentional. I would be kind and say maybe unintentional but the voices of the people are still being stifled,” says Sayed.
“The purpose of the media is to show what is happening in the world but at the same time I feel a lot of things are being hidden from the world by authorities,” argues one of the locals. Black Wednesday remembers the day in 1977 when the apartheid government banned independent media which was reporting on the brutality of the regime. Many journalists were detained as part of the ban.