Looking Back

From the Sunday Times 50 years ago

SIXTY-SEVEN Johannesburg people, some of them well known in society, were arrested in a raid on a Hillbrow gambling club early yesterday by 14 plainclothes members of the city’s Vice Squad. A roulette table and thousands of rands were confiscated.

Police were called to clear a crowd of 400 who gathered to watch the people being loaded into a shuttle-service of police vans. Among the gamblers, many of whom were immigrants, were five attractive married women from the northern suburbs. Sixty people paid R20 admission-of-guilt fines. The other seven will appear in court on a charge of illegally running a gambling club. — January 8 1967

From the Sunday Times 25 years ago

THE ANC has invited the AWB and HNP to its 80th birthday festivities in Bloemfontein this week. But by this weekend there had been no response from the parties, or from the NP and the Inkatha Freedom Party, which were invited along with all parties involved in the Congress for a Democratic SA.

The ANC’s Steve Tshwete said the extreme right-wing groups had been invited because “the problems facing this country are not exclusively those of the ANC, NP and other liberation groups. We made the invitation on the basis that all have to be responsible for transforming SA into a democracy.” — January 5 1992