The Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA) mourns the passing of our comrade, Terry Bell – journalist, organiser, author, and unflinching activist – who passed away on 25 March 2026 at the age of 83. With his departure, the movement for African liberation and social justice has lost one of its most rigorous intellects and most stubbornly principled voices.

To call Terry Bell a “labour journalist” is accurate but insufficient, much like calling the ocean “wet”. He was, for over six decades, a human seismograph for injustice – feeling the faintest tremors of exploitation long before they broke the surface. From the dark hours of high apartheid to the compromised dawn of the “new” South Africa, and right through to the genocide in Gaza, Terry never stopped speaking truth to power. As the SABC noted in its tribute, he worked tirelessly “to bring unions closer to workers and their struggles” – a task he understood as the very core of genuine liberation.

Born Terence Albert Bell in Pretoria in 1942, his political baptism was swift and total. Recruited into underground operations by ANC stalwart Joe Gqabi, he joined the Congress of Democrats and edited its clandestine publication, Combat. The apartheid state repaid his courage with detention under the infamous 90-day law in 1964, followed by nearly three decades of exile. But exile did not mean silence. In London, he met Barbara, his indispensable partner in life and struggle. Together, they co-founded the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand – which grew into the largest per-capita such movement in the world. Together, they ran the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania and drafted the first ANC primary school curriculum. Together, they attempted the gloriously madcap feat of paddling a kayak named Amandla from London to Dar es Salaam – a 13-year, hopelessly ill-prepared, utterly magnificent journey of love and defiance that Terry later chronicled in A Hat, a Kayak and Dreams of Dar.

But Terry was never content to be a relic of the struggle. Returning to South Africa in the early 1990s, he turned his formidable gaze onto the democratic dispensation with the same exacting standards he had applied to the regime. Nelson Mandela famously called him a “wayward boy” – a title Terry wore as a badge of honour. For he understood that the end of formal apartheid was not the end of exploitation, but its reconfiguration. His weekly columns, published everywhere from Business Report to GroundUp and Daily Maverick, held the trade union movement accountable even as he defended it, criticised the ANC even as he remained loyal to its original promise, and never, ever confused loyalty to a party with loyalty to the people.

His 2001 book Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth, co-written with Dumisa Ntsebeza, was a masterwork of forensic anger – meticulously documenting how corporations, local and multinational, had profited from and sustained the apartheid system in deliberate violation of UN resolutions. The book triggered class-action legal claims and remains an essential text for anyone who believes that justice delayed need not be justice denied.

Terry was, as his GroundUp colleague Alide Dasnois wrote, “a big man, big in size, big in heart, big in intellect.” He was also a ballet dancer who danced into his seventies. He wore a beret everywhere, explaining that in feudal times serfs had to doff their hats to lords – and he would doff his to no one. He loved coffee, red wine, the surf, and philosophical arguments that lasted long into the night. And even as Facebook banned him for his pro-Palestine reporting, he simply continued on his personal blog, Terry Bell Writes, publishing his final, characteristically rigorous post just six days before his death – a corrective on the Sharpeville massacre, insisting the true death toll was 91, not 69, and praising the journalists who had bothered to show up when the mainstream media would not.

That final post doubled as his credo: “We, the overwhelming majority of humanity who wish only to live in peace, remain the many while those who continue, as they did in the past, to divide, exploit and destroy, are the few.”

He was predeceased by his beloved Barbara, who died in June 2025, a loss from which he never fully recovered. He died of a heart attack while on a family trip to Graaff-Reinet. In keeping with a life of radical usefulness, he donated his body to medical science – one last gift, one last act of solidarity.

The Institute for African Alternatives salutes Terry Bell: organiser, author, journalist, dancer, kayaker, beret-wearing troublemaker. He was a force for good in a world that too often settles for less. Hamba kahle, Mkhonto. Your work – like your conscience – remains unfinished. And so, now, it becomes ours.