Sue Krige did not set out to become a quiet rebel.

When she began teaching history at a white Johannesburg school in 1977, she quickly realised that what was written in the official curriculum, and what her pupils needed to know, were two very different things. “We had a file with what we called decoy notes, notes the inspector would see. Then we had the real thing.”

That spirit of principled defiance shaped everything that followed. In 1981, Krige left teaching to join ZAKED, a struggle-aligned non-government organisation, where, on her very first day, she arrived to find security police ransacking the offices. Undeterred, she spent a decade there, developing educational materials for students who had dropped out following the June 1976 uprisings, and teaching them on weekends.

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Her political education deepened through friendships across the colour line. Friendships that, in apartheid South Africa, had to be conducted in carefully chosen spaces. “We could never go for coffee in the CBD, because we were white and black. So, we went to the Sunnyside Hotel, which was designated as an international venue.”

Later, Krige lectured in the history of education at Fitz, before founding Cultural Encounters, a heritage tour company that offered immersive, experiential journeys through Johannesburg’s layered past. Tours took in Museum Africa, Sophiatown, and Soweto, with survivors of the 1976 uprising speaking directly to visitors on the bus. “I’ve never seen kids so enthralled. These were people who were really there.”

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Krige also contributed to the Living Landscapes project in Sophiatown, capturing the oral histories of residents who had been forcibly removed – stories that might otherwise have been lost.

Now, she is channelling all of it into a memoir, not a conventional life story, but a series of snapshots from a remarkable journey. “I decided I was going to write them down before I forgot.”

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