How love in Scotland saved one man from Apartheid

The story of a South African man who escaped the Apartheid regime to move to Glasgow is to feature on television next week.

In the year when Nelson Mandela would have celebrated his 100th birthday, film-maker Dhivya Kate Chetty follows her parents – a mixed-race and once ‘illegal’ couple – on a trip back to South Africa to chart their decades-long struggle against Apartheid.

Screened on the 25th anniversary of Mandela’s historic visit to Scotland on October 9, 1993 – which the Chetty family attended – the personal meets the political in this intimate documentary about love, racism and activism.

After Apartheid policy became law in 1948, Dhivya’s father Radha, an Indian South African, watched as the family home and business were taken away from his parents and given to whites. He suffered the indignities of segregation and was eventually sent to Glasgow to attend university with the right to a decent education denied to non-whites in South Africa.

It was here, after graduating and starting work as a civil engineer, that he met and married Glaswegian Maggie. Today, in their 70s, the couple reflect on the struggle on their South African trip – their first since Radha regained his South African citizenship – to see how the decades, and democracy, have changed the country they love.

Previously unheard family secrets are unearthed along the way with rumours surfacing that Mandela himself was in hiding in the 1960s at the now-derelict Chetty family farm in the KwaZulu-Natal city of Pietermartizburg.

Intimate interviews with family members are intercut with vivid super 8 footage shot by two generations in the 60s and 70s and with newsreels from the time, telling a tale of migration, family separation, of longing and belonging.

Glasgow, Love and Apartheid will be broadcast on Tuesday, 9 October, on BBC Two Scotland from 9-10pm.