A short general history of the MRC

1969 - the era of the Hippies
For those who have forgotten the other details of 1969, it's worth recalling that a loaf of white bread cost 8 cents and a toilet roll 4 cents. A pound of choice butter cost 38 cents and very few new cars cost more than R3 300. British troops arrived in Northern Ireland "to restore order", Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel, and a four-day arts and music fair near Woodstock in the Catskill Mountains of New York State drew 300 000 young people who condemned the Universal Soldier and sang We Shall Overcome. The United States of America had buried both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, and having just inaugurated President Richard Nixon, turned its collective eye to the night skies on 20 July 1969. Two crewmen from the rocket Apollo 11, N.A. (Neil) Armstrong and E.E. (Buzz) Aldrin, made that "one giant leap for mankind" when they walked on the surface of the moon. Millions of people throughout the world watched as their TV sets instantly relayed man's first steps on another celestial body.

In South Africa, the introduction of the 'bioscope in a box' had only just been recommended and was to take six years to implement. Any local leap for mankind would take much longer. Then as now, people were both fragile and resilient. "You destroy a community by mass removals" said Dr Oscar Wollheim in Cape Town (Dr Wollheim was one of two Progressive Party coloured representatives in the Cape Provincial Council, elected in 1965). If he was preaching, only the converted heard him. Steve Biko founded the South African Students' Organisation, while a defiant South African Parliament passed the South West Africa Act that increased its power over the territory and set itself on a perilously uncharted road.