Beautifully written, humane in judgement, an essential account from a frontline soldier of the ambiguities of South Africas unfinished struggle for liberation. Prof. Thula Simpson
I would be silent, just as all those before me had been silent but for how long? I needed counselling, and how does one heal without revealing everything one has experienced? It was an open secret that Quatro was the ANCs version of a Nazi concentration camp, or as I later learnt, the Gulag of the Soviet Union.
Luthando Dyasops memoir starts with a vivid account of his young life as a black artist in apartheid South Africa. From the Wild Coast, at times idyllic despite the frustrations of Bantu Education, he takes the reader along on a journey beyond the Drakensberg Mountains, where an idealistic Dyasop joins uMkhonto we Sizwe, the banned ANCs military wing. Soon disillusioned by the autocratic rule within the training camps, Dyasop falls out of favour with the powers that be.
Implicated in a comrades suicide attempt, then suspected of mutiny, he is sent to the Quatro detention centre. After years of daily beatings and gruelling physical labour, Dyasop is eventually released, and finds himself in Tanzania, where he begins his battle for vindication. Out of Quatro is a story not only about Dyasops extraordinary life, but also about a tumultuous time in ANC history, the resonance of which is still being felt today. Decades after his release from Quatro, Dyasop has found his voice to tell his story.