Char of Its Disguise

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Communism Act and allowed for banning of all and any opponents of apartheid.

Under one section of this Act witnesses or potential witnesses in a state trial can be held for up to six months, if the state thinks they will abscond or be intimidated.

In the 15 months up to September 1977 official South. African figures said 2430 people had been arrested under the various provisions of these and other overtly political laws. More than 1300 people have been banned since 1950.

Torture The booklet outlines many examples of torture used as a casual part of the state system. In its solemn careful way, always it seems trying to convince a reluctant and disbelieving audience, Amnesty International comes to the conclusion that torture has been an everyday occurance for the past 15 years. iously ripped off the mi class 'charity' world by Idle Ionlast Tuesday's BBC 1 'Play for Today'.

The After Dinner Joke by Caryl Churchill tore into the illusion that charity is somehow "outside politics" , dealing particularly memorably with the question of colonial exploitation and "disaster relief"

Selby, a young employee of a big business charity, seeks out ways and means of "selling" charity to an audience.

Her efforts threaten to lead from drawing polite attention to the poverty of Ceylonese teapickers to the point of outright profits and vicious exploitation of agitation against the swollen the tea monopolies.

Her employers in embarassment transfer her to the job of spending some of the enormous sums of money contributed by bourgeois and middle class supporters.

She is told it makes little sense to give aid in the Gulf Stateswhose national income is in excess of that in Britain, though monopolised by a handful of Sheikhs, while the remainder of the population exist in grinding poverty.

She encounters the land owner/money lender/grain dealer/ supplier in BanglaDesh and hears how the peasant farmer is tied hand and foot in a system that ensures continued starvation.

And she travels to a hurricane "disaster" site, where banana monopolies have driven native farmers out of their valley holdings onto the hillsides, creating the conditions for a massive landslide.

that with the charity's aid things will soon be back "as they were" she is challenged by a voluntary worker, who points out that it was "things as they were" that caused the disaster, and that the problem is a political one.

The same point is rammed home by the Mayor, who proves that everything, every word, can aspect, and that charity cannot be separated from it.

The play offered no answers. But, in wittily and amusingly shooting down the prevalent middle class myth that "charity" is a non-political, non-class ques tion rather than a cosmetic dressing for the horrors of capitalism and imperialism it: served a useful function.