Alf Wannenburgh

Alfred ("Alf") John Wannenburgh (1936-2010, Cape Town) was a South African author, journalist, and anti-Apartheid activist of Anglo-Germanic and French Huguenot descent. Wannenburgh attended Rondebosch Boys' High School (RBHS) and received his undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology and African History from the University of Cape Town. During his undergraduate degree, he worked as a land surveyor's assistant, salesman, clerk, and window-dresser in the Cape Town City Bowl. Wannenburgh worked for many years as a reporter, columnist, and sub-editor for the Cape Times (for nearly two decades) and a variety of other newspaper houses and other diverse publications (including Animan, New Age, "Negroes Digest", and the South African Sunday Independent). Spoken of by his colleagues in his 2010 Cape Times' staff obituary as an "affable activist" and "laid-back hero" who perpetually underplayed his contribution to the anti-Apartheid struggle, as a member of the Congress of Democrats, the armed (military) wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and the Communist Party in South Africa Wannenburgh is most significantly associated with the Sophiatown Renaissance, his role as one of the thirty Congress Alliance delegates chosen to travel to the historic 1955 Congress of the People (political) gathering held in Kliptown in June of that year, wherein a vision for a new democratic South Africa would be realised and explicitly expressed through the drawing-up of the Freedom Charter ("the [actionable] vision of the South African people"). He was a covert member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation") noted for his part in the Underground Movement (wherein one of his duties involved bomb-making for the resistance).