Then and Now

21 March 1960. Sharpeville, in the Transvaal, South Africa. The massacre of 69 blacks was the event that politicised me as a young boy and taught me about injustice and hate.

Today is the day that - finally - two of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence have been sentenced to life imprisonment for a racist killing in 1993 in Eltham, near London in the UK.

The connection, for me, is the understanding that, while it may take many years, racism, apartheid and everything in their shadow will be defeated and consigned to a museum.

But we have to persist. Every day...