Free. Book here.

A panel discussion with clips of archive footage from documentaries about apartheid & the liberation of South Africa from the 1960s to 1990s.

It is also a last chance to see Norman Kaplan’s All Shall Be Afforded Dignity Exhibition at the Portico Library

Statement from Norman Kaplan on the opening of the exhibition of his prints and cartoons

at the Portico Library, Manchester, 13 March 2025

‘Greetings to all. I would like to thank the Portico Library for hosting this exhibition as part of the 30th Anniversary celebrating the end of apartheid in South Africa and ushering in a new democratic dispensation. I can think of no more fitting venue. It is, for me, a great honour and privilege for my work to be situated amongst such a wonderful collection of books in such a beautiful setting. It is an essential repository of history, art, politics, ideas, wonder and imagination, celebrating the achievements of the human spirit.

Marx commented that there was a time when ignorance was considered to be a negative quality. We are now living in an age where it is a quality, not only to be emulated, but applauded, lauded and rewarded. When the truth of history is being, not only, demeaned and distorted but, by the click of a finger on a keyboard, completely deleted. The poet Heinrich Heine prophetically wrote, "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people." Today, this can be updated to "Where they delete books, they will ultimately delete people." ‘