Peter Randall, a pioneering South African activist publisher and educator, passed away on 5 June 2024 in Johannesburg. He was the co-founder of Ravan Press, which published books critical of the racist apartheid state.
Randall was born in Durban in 1935. He was a gifted scholar but was at odds with the country’s political environment. From 1948 onwards, the white minority government passed a series of highly repressive laws to entrench apartheid’s “separate development” policies.
Randall believed in the innate equality of all and his moral objections to racially segregated classrooms led him to leave teaching to raise awareness about the wrongs of apartheid. He first did so at the South African Institute for Race Relations, an independent think tank conducting research on racial policies.
