Gladys Thomas

"To write was a need; I had to write down messages, to tell apartheid's horrors."

"I always imagined poetry is supposed to be beauty, about beauty and pleasant things. Well I sat in a train one day and saw this lorry full of furniture going, coming here... and I wrote a poem about Group Areas ‘Fall tomorrow.’ In the last stanza I wrote, that the government of that time is going to fall [ ]. This was about the anger. Bringing out all the anger of moving and seeing this people moving and seeing people breaking up their wardrobes and their cupboards because it can’tfit through the doors here."

"Rooted in Salt River, Simon’s Town and Ocean View, Gladys Thomas’s narration of the struggle of a nation for freedom challenged the construct of ‘forgotten communities’. She championed the tribulations and triumphs of people who did not have the means to tell their stories in the distinctive and memorable way in which she took up their plight."