From the foreword:

Beyond The Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa in the 1980s
Photographs by Twenty South African Photographers. Foreword by the Reverend Frank Chikane. Essay by André Odendaal.
A Kliptown Book with the cooperation of Afrapix and the Centre for Documentary Photography, Cape Town.

Many of the pictures in Beyond the Barricades could not be taken today in South Africa. The government, which declared a "State of Emergency" in a largely successful attempt to erase news of popular resistance from international attention, would outlaw this documentation.

4. (1) No person shall without the prior consent of the Commissioner or of a member of a security force serving as a commissioned officer in that force take any photographs or make or produce any television recording, film recording, drawing or other depiction
(a) of any unrest or security action or of any incident occurring in the course thereof, including the damaging or destruction of property or the injuring or killing of persons, or
(b) of any damaged or destroyed property or injured or dead persons or other visible.
— Government Gazette of the Republic of South Africa. Vol 276, No 11342

This book presents eloquent and searing testimony of the communal struggle for freedom as witnessed and expressed by South Africans. Their words and images take us beyond the barricades that keep most of the media from the heart of the conflict.

Beyond the Barricades provides an in-depth look at the complex issues surrounding the conflict in this racially divided society. For example, the roots of what the South African government calls "black-on-black" violence or "inter-tribal" warfare are shown to be a planned by-product of state apartheid policy. The real atrocity in South Africa is the systematic nature of the often violent oppression of over 25 million blacks by the racist white regime.

Beyond the Barricades presents the voice of the tyrannized through disturbing testimony, much of it previously unpublished, of police oppression, vigilante violence, and legalized racial discrimination. In their own words, in affidavits collected from around the country, South Africans tell of midnight beatings, arbitrary arrests, and murder. They expose the close relationship between government forces and vigilante groups. Most important, however, is the evidence—visual and textual—of strong, organized, community-based resistance to apartheid, and of the increasingly powerful trade union movement that stands for freedom both inside and outside the workplace.