At the South African university I attended during the apartheid years, several of my fellow students disappeared during the night. Taken away by the police, they were held in solitary confinement, without access to lawyers, family or reading matter, for weeks and sometimes for months. A few were tortured.

Yet, being white, we were mostly a lucky bunch. We enjoyed an excellent standard of living and a fine education. There was anxiety about who at the university might be police informers, but for us, the security apparatus was never as all-enveloping as it was either for black South Africans or for those living in communist dictatorships.

But the experience left me with an enduring commitment to democratic government and the rule of law, and a horror of unaccountable authority.