Picking bathroom taps is of little interest to me, but it has to be done - Mary Burton

I do think about it a lot,’ she says. “It’s intellectually interesting to think about what might be done, to try and find solutions

At the time, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I was fortunate in that my husband supported me. But my parents-in-law were very anxious. And that was something that really had to be negotiated. My mother-in-law had known some of the women who first joined the Black Sash, but she said to me, you know, that they left because it was getting very communistic. I mean, there was nothing communistic about the group. But that was the perception – very clever propaganda on the part of the government. And anything communism was just terrifying, people were absolutely terrified.

However, I came home at night to a family, most of my days. There were people who worked for the TRC who did not have that kind of support. And I think many of them carry much more trauma from that time than I do. The problem was, hearing so many stories. You might not have paid enough attention to each one, the attention each and every one deserved