My research will attempt to contribute, challenge and/or revise received understandings of political killings. This research will look at certain case investigations of missing and disappeared individuals and what these investigations offer in terms of providing depth and nuance to the dominant social histories about the liberation struggle, which are often replicated in the understandings of many ordinary South Africans. This research asks whether it is possible to find alternative explanations and frameworks to understanding the anti-apartheid struggle. In doing so it looks at the construction of biographies of persons who went missing or ‘disappeared’ during the time of the anti-apartheid struggle.