If I don’t write down what I’ve witnessed, who will? We can easily say we can’t look at this stuff, we can’t record it because it’s too shocking, but… - Margie Orford

I think we keep the secrets from ourselves. Because we have experienced a moment when you look into a person’s eyes and you see that how they are looking at you is dehumanising. In that moment, all your humanity is lost. And it’s unbearable. We keep that secret from our daughters, because we don’t want them to be seen in that way.

The heart is blind. You can’t love unless you have the heart of a child. It’s beautiful, but it’s the thing that makes you vulnerable. And when this connects with the secrets you hold, it can create a distortion in the psyche.

There was such a sense of liberation and opening that sort of space that had been closed off so completely under Apartheid – no light, no oxygen – it really opened and expanded and into that came so much publishing and writing.