Andrew Feinstein

Stories Seldom Told

Andrew Feinstein is a former African National Congress (ANC) Member of Parliament who served in South Africa under Nelson Mandela. He resigned in protest in 2001 at the ruling party’s refusal to allow an unfettered investigation into a massively corrupt $10bn arms deal. He is an author of the critically-acclaimed The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade which reveals the corruption at the heart of the global arms business. He is also a film-maker and campaigner on the damage wrought by the global arms trade, and Executive Director of the London-based non-profit Shadow World Investigations. Andrew is the son of a Holocaust survivor and is married to Simone, a Bangladeshi woman, with whom he has two children.

"I lived in an area surrounded only by so-called White people, and the only people who were black African or so-called coloured or of mixed race - and I'm sorry to have to use this apartheid-era nomenclature - I would see people who are not white, anytime between the beginning of the day and sunset, and thereafter they would disappear. And I never fully understood that they were disappearing to their own racial group areas. And of course, they were only doing certain menial jobs that were allowed to them. I remember very early on my South African grandmother referring to the person who worked in her garden - who must have been in his mid to late 60s - and she would refer to him as boy. And I think growing up in that sort of environment, where these notions of superiority, both conscious and unconscious, are almost taken for granted, is incredibly, incredibly damaging."