The battle of Solferino took place on 24 June 1859 in Solferino, Italy. A swiss businessman by the name of Henry Dunant witnessed the battle and wrote a book called ‘A memory of Solferino’. In this book he put forward two ideas, one, to create volunteer medical services to help the wounded on the battlefield and two, for an international agreement to be adopted to protect the wounded and all those attending to them.

As a result the International Committee for the Relief of the Wounded was founded in 1863. In 1864, the first Geneva Convention was adopted by 10 states and the first National Societies were formed. In 1876 the Committee was renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross. In 1919 the League of Red Cross Societies (now the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) was formed to coordinate the activities of National Societies worldwide.

This booklet not only aims to commemorate the ‘birth’ of the Red Cross but to specifically pay tribute to the work done by the ICRC in South Africa between 1963 and 1991. In 1963 the ICRC started visiting political detainees on Robben Island, from then on the ICRC visited thousands of prisoners countrywide and assisted their families with food and travel tickets to visit their detained family member's.