Shortly after the declaration of a state of emergency in South Africa in July 1985, Florence, a female comrade from Diepkloof, was rounded up by police along with fourteen male comrades. Then aged seventeen, she was taken to ‘Sun City’, as Diepkloof prison was colloquially known, where she spent the next two weeks in solitary confinement, her isolation broken only by regular trips to Protea Police Station for interrogation. As a COSAS leader, she explained, she experienced particularly harsh abuse: ‘you think of anything, they’ve done it to me.’ During her interrogations police forced her to strip naked, placed a wet sack over her head, beat her, and made her perform strenuous exercises. Yet despite such violence, she cast her arrest and time spent in detention as a central marker of her political commitment. In our first interview in 2014, she presented detention as a terrible experience, but one that could be overcome through a focus on the goals of the struggle and steadfast commitment to the liberation movement. ‘I told myself that even if I die, I’m happy,’ she stated. ‘Because I’d be dying for a cause.’ She narrated her experiences in detention fluidly and assuredly, without being specifically asked to do so, and as we were wrapping up the interview she added, ‘The only thing that I was praying for was to come out of that alive, so that I can tell a story one day. Luckily, thank you for coming today.’

A year later, I arrived back in Florence's Diepkloof home for a second interview but found her demeanour as an interviewee to be remarkably different. She opened by saying that she was so nervous and anxious to speak to me again that she had not slept the night before. ‘I feel so traumatised after talking about it,’ she admitted. ‘I realised that there are things that even though I want to remember… I cannot, because they can't come back to my mind… When you relive those moments, they bring up sort of anger in you and they open a chapter that you never knew you had.’