Review: Time Served by Colin Purkey

David Floyd on a Barnet resident’s memoir of activism in apartheid South Africa

The front cover of Time Served by Colin Purkey

Time Served is the memoir of an ordinary person who was part of some extraordinary events. Colin Purkey is a Barnet resident who, before retirement, spent over 20 years teaching physics at a further education college. He is also a political activist who was imprisoned by South Africa’s notorious apartheid regime.

This is an engaging but unusual book. It’s split into three sections which are not sequential. The first section covers the months that the author spent in prison, having been arrested for posting a letter on behalf of a leading anti-apartheid activist.

The second section covers his experience in hospital having been hit by a car as a teenager. And the third section is a broader look at life within the anti-apartheid movement during the 1980s and early 90s as the regime eventually crumbled and was forced to move towards democracy.

It’s an unusual book in that it covers big historical events in a deeply personal way. There is a lot of detail of meetings, events and activities and how they connect to the wider cause but also about how Purkey’s involvement impacts on his life and relationships (in terms of having to live away from home or holding meetings in disguise to avoid the police).

It includes multiple snapshots of relatively similar incidents: the security police turn up at Purkey’s and conduct a search while being intimidating and rude, and Purkey recounts his interactions with them alongside his fears of particular incriminating documents being discovered.

In the third section in particular, the significance of each particular snapshot to a wider narrative is not always clear but cumulatively they build an overall impression of what it’s like to be an activist fighting an oppressive regime.

Each of the sections drifts back and forth between the time period it is specifically covering and other memories that Purkey draws on to explain his wider perspective. So, while the section on his imprisonment is the most diary-like, the week to week stories are interwoven with flashbacks of the author’s time at university where he first experienced some of the ideas that would motivate his activism.

The short second section, where Purkey discusses his hospitalisation and subsequent health problems, is a total break from the political narratives before and after, although it also takes some detours – including into the philosophy of consciousness.

Taken as a whole, Time Served is difficult to categorise. It is someone writing about important and significant events in their own life, from a very personal perspective but recounting a political period that also had a much wider significance.

Purkey’s voice is often idiosyncratic but also highly self aware: making clear that, despite his own distressing experience, he understands the privileges that liberal white activists had in comparison to the black majority on the receiving end of the regime’s actions.

For a general reader with an interest in the experience of activism, there is potentially lots to enjoy but some of the detail and the often haphazard progress of the narrative may be off putting.

For a student studying the history of the latter period of South Africa’s apartheid regime, it will definitely be an invaluable primary source.

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