Terry Bell, veteran trade unionist, anti-apartheid activist, journalist and general thorn in the side of the establishment, once said he was an ANC member who had strayed far from the fold. His principles and beliefs in justice, decency and equality remained his core convictions.
The qualities drove him into exile during apartheid and afterwards to continue to rattle the new elite, whose own principles turned out to be more flexible.
Terence Albert Bell was born in 1942. He was recruited into the ANC while still a student and was detained in 1964. After his release he walked to Zambia and made his way to the UK, where he rekindled his relationship with fellow South African activist and the love of his life, Barbara Edmunds.
The couple’s desire to make a difference fuelled their scheme to paddle a 5m kayak, Amandla, down the Thames and along the coast of East Africa to Dar es Salaam to join the ANC in 1967. Their only chart was a Michelin road map, Bell recounted 50 years later in his memoir A hat, a kayak & dreams of Dar.
They headed south on the gentle French waterways. The voyage came to an end on the Mediterranean after a few bruising weeks on the Spanish coast. Realising the folly, they sold Amandla and travelled overland to Tanzania, where they set up the primary school of the ANC’s Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Morogoro and jointly drafted the first ANC primary school curriculum.
By 1972 the couple had moved to New Zealand, where they founded that country’s anti-apartheid movement, which aggravated the Nationalist government with boycotts, not least against the Springbok rugby team.
In 1991, they settled in Muizenberg, where they lived for the rest of their lives and from where Bell continued to get under the skin of big business with his needle-sharp column Inside Labour that ran in Business Report, Fin24 and City Press.
The subject of one of those columns, Independent Media chair Iqbal Survé, sued him for R100m in 2016 for defamation following a Fin24 article that Survé said painted him as a narcissist and a liar and impugned his reputation. The column questioned claims Survé had made, including that he had had a close relationship with Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada and that he had been Bafana Bafana’s “mind coach” for their African Cup of Nations victory in 1996.
He continued to get under the skin of big business with his needle-sharp column Inside Labour
Bell, who had started journalism on tough East Rand newspapers before becoming a battle-hardened trade unionist used to staring down big business, laughed off the suit, saying there were far more important things in life to worry about. The litigation fizzled out with no binding court finding.
Bell’s prolific output included the book Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth (2003), written with jurist Dumisa Ntsebeza, which exposed how South African and foreign businesses had exploited and profited from apartheid while also violating UN resolutions.
Bell held fast to his beliefs that South Africa’s labour movement had been betrayed by the agreement it made with the ANC in the run-up to the democratic elections in 1994.
He explained the machinations in an interview days before the May 1 Workers’ Day in 2024: “There was one group within the trade union movement saying: ‘Hang on a minute, we don’t just want to take over this parliamentary democracy, we’re still workers. The biggest employer in the land is the state, so how can we be in bed with our bosses?’”
The result was the agreement to incorporate the labour movement, including Cosatu, into government. “They might have thought they were the tail wagging the dog,” he said. “That didn’t happen. They ended up at the other end.”
He was at the time brimming with excitement about a book project campaigning for universal, free secular preschool education that Barbara had started 14 years before, and that he admitted he had “interrupted with a whole couple of books and a few other things”.
The initiative was almost done, he said, pointing out that while the first proper professional preschool training took place in Britain in 1930, the second “was probably in South Africa in Sophiatown in 1936”.
Barbara, who had earned the nickname “Barbed Wire” for her dedication to her convictions, died in 2025, following a debilitating illness.
Bell joined his daughter, Ceiren, in the UK, but returned to South Africa at the end of 2025. He died unexpectedly in the former Graaff-Reinet on March 25 while on a road trip with his family. One of the last things he said was: “Your mother loved it here.”
