It now feels like a lifetime ago, but there was a time in SA where information – especially political information – was not at one’s fingertips like it is the case today. This was not just because there were still no cellphones, tablets and other mobile devices back then.

Access to information was difficult precisely because the state at the time had designed it to be so. The National Party government knew that knowledge was power and believed that starving those it kept under the yoke of oppression of information would mean its prolonged stay in power...