He was born in 1956, grew up in District Six, Woodstock, and Salt River in Cape Town. Tariq as he is known, was born to a single mother in a poor Camissa African (“Coloured”) community where his family included people classified as coloured, white, and Indian under Apartheid. Tariq’s mother was a laundry and garment worker in District Six who earned a pittance, and thus for most of his childhood he was homeless and cared for in foster homes and institutions. With a broken high school education, he went out into factory work at the age of 16, earning ten rands for a 6-day week.

From 1972, he became an activist against the Apartheid regime and a trades unionist and worked in faith-based civil society organizations. He experienced arrest and mental and physical abuse, and because of his political activism and civil disobedience, he was forced to go on the run from the security police, crossing the border in 1978 and spending 13 years in exile serving in the liberation movement. Two free newspapers that he started in Cape Town, ‘Young Voice’ and ‘New Voice,’ were declared banned publications in 1977, one after the other. In exile, he served under arms and in the ANC Department of Publicity and Information, working on Radio Freedom and in the Liberation Press. He also served on the editorial boards of SECHABA and several publications.

He qualified as a Lithographic Printer in Botswana at the Mmegi wa Dikgang Serowe Brigades and later at the London College of Printing – College of Communications, London University of the Arts in the early 1980s, and in 1999, through part-time study, he attained an MSc degree from Buckinghamshire New University, UK. The focus of his studies was on heritage tourism rooted in Cape Indigenous societies and the Cape enslaved from Africa and Asia. He is now well known as an expert on these subjects.

In the law enforcement arena Tariq specialised in combatting Human Trafficking in the modern era which had a synergy with historic slavery studies. A highlight of his career in the maritime environment was when he pioneered, conceptualised, developed a groundbreaking project and implemented it in Cape Town harbour – a Cruise Liner Terminal and Inter-Agency Security Command Centre together with a shopping a leisure precinct (Maker’s Landing).

He writes for journals and newspapers and regularly appears on radio and television and has authored several publications, worked in filmmaking, and played a prominent role in the establishment of the IZIKO Slave Lodge Museum and the Camissa Museum at the Castle in Cape Town. He is the author of 12 works on various subjects. mostly historical, with his latest book being THE TRUTH ABOUT CAPE SLAVERY – THE FOUNDATIONS OF COLONIAL SOUTH AFRICA. In 2020, he produced the acclaimed best-seller – THE LIE OF 1652. In 2009 he was awarded provincial honors in recognition of his contribution to public understanding of intangible heritage in the Western Cape.

BOOKS:

Among many other publications and film documentaries Patric Tariq Mellet is the author of “VOICES of Black Entrepreneurs in Tourism” (2005); “Lenses on Cape Identities – Exploring Roots in South Africa” (2009); “The lie of 1652 – A decolonised history of land” (2020); “Cleaners’ Boy – A Resistance Road to a Liberated Life” (2022); “Reg September, Liberated African 1923 – 2013:  Founder of the South African Coloured People’s Congress” (2023 together with Melissa Steyn); “A Brief History of the Foundation Peoples in the Peopling of South Africa – A Perspective on Origins rooted in the San, Khoe and Kalundu-Urewe-Kalanga” (2023) and “The Truth about Cape Slavery – The Foundations of Colonial South Africa” (2024).