Tony Trew

Tony Trew (also known as Anthony Andrew Trew) (Cape Town, 6 July 1941) is a South African politician and discourse analyst. He was one of the editors of the seminal book Language and control, which helped establish critical linguistics as an academic field.

Early life Trew was born in Cape Town to father, Antony Trew, naval officer and author and mother Nora Houthakker. He has two brothers, Peter Trew a British politician and Robert Trew, an architect. where he would remain until 1991; in this position he coordinated research on South Africa, as well as monitoring tasks in collaboration with political dissenters and NGOs. Trew was involved, as representative of the ANC in exile, in talks with concerned white South African's who travelled overseas to talk with the ANC during the mid-eighties until 1990 when the organisation was unbanned. He was part of the ANC representatives that met IDASA at the Dakar Conference in July 1987.

He returned to South Africa in 1991 to work as senior researcher for the African National Congress, and in 1993 he was selected as research coordinator for the Elections Commission of the ANC. A year later he was transferred to the Office of the President as Director of Communications Research, a post he held until 1999.

Honours In April 2019, he was awarded the Order of Luthuli by the South African government for "his contribution to the attainment of democracy and to the reconstruction of a post-apartheid society".