John Aitchison

Numbering the Dead John Aitchison

Numbering the Dead is a seminal account of the violent civil conflict that broke out around the city of Pietermaritzburg in 1987 and what ensued over the next three years. Aitchison and his colleagues, based at the Centre for Adult Education, documented and dissected the ebb and flow and the changing circumstances of this not-so-low intensity civil war in the region.

They collected, computerised, and categorised literally thousands of instances of eyewitness or documentary evidence, and then applied an innovative synthesis of qualitative and quantitative approaches that uncovered the patterns and intimated the underlying causes.

This book, mainly covering the period 1987 to 1989, presents a distillation of this monitoring work, conducted under unimaginably difficult and stressful conditions.

It was originally done with the simple aim of stopping the killing by telling people in the province, in South Africa and the world what was happening, as accurately and truthfully as possible.