Reviews
Reviews of Bloody Sunday
Edwin T. Smith, Mail and Guardian
‘Both [Mignonne Breier’s] training as a journalist and an academic researcher are put to great use and value in her study, making Bloody Sunday simultaneously a credible work of rigorous scholarship and phenomenal storytelling…
Bloody Sunday is remarkably timely. It enables citizens to appreciate the challenges and contestations in contemporary South Africa through the lens of a historical milestone and its disastrous consequences. Current leadership wrangling in the ANC which distracts from the larger societal discontent – as was the case in East London 1952 – requires vigilance and attention as this book so painfully reminds us.
Marianne Thamm, associate editor, Daily Maverick, 22 May 2021, in Maverick 168
Breier’s tender and deeply researched book now adds to our greater understanding of a past with which we are still coming to terms.
Marianne Thamm, associate editor, Daily Maverick, in Facebook post
I started reading Mignonne Breier’s “Bloody Sunday” on Thursday and have just finished. It is an extraordinary work which takes in a grand sweep of history and events which convulsed through Duncan Village in East London when police organised an attack on residents during the Defiance Campaign. Jacob Dlamini describes this as “a truly stunning book” which it is. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to fathom the depths of pain that is the legacy of South Africa but also the depth of love.
It is a layered excavation of the massacre of hundreds of nameless residents of Duncan Village in 1952 … as well as the brutal and shocking murder of Sister Aidan Quinlan. It is a study of the role of religion and specifically Roman Catholicism with its rituals and dogma and also political organisation in the face of state violence. It offers the forgotten story of ANC leaders and the dead and secretly buried…”
Gunther Simmermacher, editor, The Southern Cross
It requires courage and empathy to give a fair account of the mob murder of Dominican Sister Aidan Quinlan in East London in 1952. In her forensic study of the killing of the Irish-born nun, Mignonne Breier meets these obligations admirably… The author skilfully weaves the narrative of Sr Aidan’s life with the stories of some of those who would play a part in the events of that fateful November 9… in the midst of what may be the worst police massacre in apartheid history. Even nearly seven decades after the events it describes, Bloody Sunday reveals much that was not well known, or known at all. Breier has expertly marshalled her extensive and meticulous research into a gripping narrative that is fair-minded and compassionate. This is an important and commendable work.
EXIT, newspaper for the LGBTQI community, South Africa (anonymous reviewer)
I give credit to Mignonne Breier for taking up the difficult task of writing this book. Putting together a story of a life lived so simply yet so significantly, with very scarcely available reference material and records, I can only imagine what a difficult task it must have been. This is not an ordinary memoir novel, it is a textbook of history, religion and many lessons that should never be forgotten.
Sally Roper, Independent Catholic News.
“As forensic journalism this book is a crucial study of early apartheid… But above all it memorialises the life of much-loved ‘Dr Sister’ Elsie Quinlan and the unknown numbers of Duncan villagers who also died that summer’s night….. A powerful feature of this book is how the author has skilfully been able to reconstruct aspects of Sister Aidan’s inner life.”
Rosalind English, co-editor UK Human Rights Blog and presenter of podcasts on Law Pod UK (comment on Facebook)
I have just finished Bloody Sunday. I couldn’t put it down. From the first chapter, to the end, I was transfixed. Mignonne Breier is a master in interweaving layers of analysis, raw data, deep dives into everything from the evolution of apartheid to the minutiae of the King Dominicans order. Breier’s narrative of the crisis at the centre of this story is all the more harrowing for its dispassionate reporting of witness and police evidence.
I would press this book on anybody with any interest in the strange dedication of young women to the Catholic mission, the history of the ANC and the Nationalist Party in South Africa, and … the madness of crowds.
Vivien Horler, The Books Page, Uncovering the Terrible Truth of a Secret Massacre, 25 June 2021
Mignonne Breier has brought all her skills as a journalist, academic and researcher to uncovering the dreadful events of a massacre in East London on November 9, 1952.
Breier has interviewed some of the people who were there, and also haunted archives all over South Africa, including Catholic archives which contained a great deal about Sister Aidan. She has read the transcripts of the legal investigations that followed, and the murder trial. Some of what she discovered was truly ghastly.
This is an awful story, meticulously researched and well told.
Elaine Roets, Plus 50 Magazine, June/July 2021
Years and Years of research in archives and libraries and conversations with experts, contemporaries and family lead to the remarkable results found in books like Bloody Sunday….
Christopher Merrett, From the Thornveld, blog
[A shorter version of this review also published in The Witness.]
The broad sweep of apartheid history is well-known and debated. But there remain many silences, particularly around peripheral parts of the country. This is ironic in the case of the Eastern Cape, which was at the forefront of resistance. One such silence, now filled by Mignonne Breier in her thoroughly researched, carefully presented and clearly written account is the massacre of Remembrance Sunday, 9 November, 1952 at Duncan Village, East London during the ANC’s Defiance Campaign.
Breier has produced an exemplary piece of historical research that probes deeply into what was probably the worst one-day massacre in South Africa’s history. In doing so, specific details aside, she describes a range of behaviours that were to be repeated time and again by the apartheid regime; and even after its demise as the Marikana massacre would testify.
Academics
Jacob Dlamini, journalist, historian, Princeton University
It is all too easy to speak in the abstract about the violence of apartheid; it is much more difficult to speak in concrete terms about what that violence did to individuals and to communities. Yet, as Mignonne Breier shows with such commendable skill in this poignant book, that harder task is, in fact, exactly what South African history needs. Breier revisits the tragic events of November 9, 1952, to tell us in vivid and disturbing detail about the brutal murder of Sister Mary Aidan Quinlan outside East London and about the subsequent and revengeful massacre whose death toll may never be known. This is a moving book about ghosts and about the complex ways in which they haunt both the past and the present. It is also a book about history and about the need for South Africans to learn to listen to voices from the past in order to re-imagine the telling of their haunted history. It is a truly stunning book.
Jeff Peires, historian, University of Fort Hare, South Africa
Intended as a show-piece of non-violent passive resistance, the ANC Defiance
Campaign of 1952 proved anything but. The tragic death of Sister Aidan Quinlan, still. memorialised in East London today, was only the tip of an iceberg, hitherto hidden from history. Documenting fully and for the first time the hideous violence – on both sides – of 9 November 1952, Bloody Sunday brings to life Santayana’s old adage that “those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Even if you read only one book a year, you should read this.
Francis B. Nyamnjoh, anthropologist, University of Cape Town
…Mignonne Breier’s meticulously researched and most unsettling yet compelling account of the fate that befell Sister Aidan in 1952 demonstrates how such self-abnegation and devotion to feeding hungry souls with one’s time, love, faith and service can be misunderstood in a highly racialized and politically volatile context such as apartheid South Africa with devastating consequences. The book is a clarion call for moderation and compassion…
Njabulo Ndebele, author, former Vice Chancellor of UCT, chairperson of the Nelson Mandela Foundation (personal communication):
I finished reading your extraordinarily beautiful book a few days ago! What a joy it was! An uplifting experience! .. I send you my admiration and congratulations on your enormous achievement… Thank you so much for this book: I have learned so much from it. Above all, it is beautifully written!