BOOK SA – Magazine

Of the two 2009 Sunday Times Literary Awards winners, we’ve seen an excerpt from one, Anne Landsman’s Fiction Prize winner, The Rowing Lesson (which you can read here).

The other, however – Peter Harris’ gripping account of the trial of the Delmas Four, In a Different Time, which won the Alan Paton Award – has heretofore gone unexcerpted on our network.

Clearly, this is a problem that requires rectification without delay. We are very pleased, then, to bring you one of the book’s key scenes, in which Harris and his colleagues lead the evidence of notorious apartheid operative Dirk Coetzee – in their clients’ defence:

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We meet Coetzee in the hall. He’s wearing a sporty checked jacket and looking pumped up, ready for the occasion. In the past few days, Dennis Kuny has spent a lot of time with him going over his evidence. Bheki and I have also spoken to him to get his motivation right. Fortunately, reviving his spirits wasn’t too difficult: all it took to get his blood up were a few reminders of how his erstwhile colleagues had turned on him. With Coetzee is his brother Ben who has come to London to be with him at this critical time and is a major stabilising influence.

I have to hand it to Dirk Coetzee, he’s a fighter. He shows no fear or apprehension. I’ve come to realise how resilient he’s been in dealing with his isolation, desperately alone, estranged from family, friends and country, and at the mercy of his former sworn enemies, the comrades of people he’s murdered. That he’s still alive is extraordinary, and contrary to all predictions, including mine. Nevertheless, despite the fraught situation, he’s prepared to testify against the police.
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BOOK SA’s own SA Partridge has crumpled up the sophomore’s curse that is a writer’s second novel and consigned it to the waste heaps with great dispatch. It seems like just yesterday that she debuted with The Goblet Club – it was, in fact, 26 October, 2007 – and now the author has an “explosive new novel” that will be sure to captivate her many fans (yes, with SA Partridge, one can speak of “fans”) – not to mention augment their numbers.

Fuse is about bullying at school, and its potentially devastating consequences. The examples from real life are all to plentiful: we remember the young Morne Harmse, for instance, who killed 16-year-old Jacques Pretorius with a sword last year, purportedly after being bullied to the point of despair.

Partridge’s characters are called Kendall Mullins and Craig Baumgarten – a pair whom the bullies have in their sights. The fuse is lit – but will the bomb go off, or will the spark be extinguished in the nick of time?

Sniff. My writers are growing up. Here’s the excerpt:

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Robbery is the best policy
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The title of Moeletsi Mbeki’s new book, Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism needs Changing, has a progenitor: namely, the phrase architects of apartheid, which is deployed at the drop of a hat (a fedora from the 1950s, no doubt) whenever the bad old days come under rhetorical fire.

We’re used to hearing architects of apartheid, and thus Mbeki has done a neat trick here, forcing our minds to recalibrate the notions that inhere in the phrase – of powerful men doing wrong in Africa, for instance (they are black, suddenly, not white) or of the scale of the wrong (which now extends beyond South Africa’s borders).

Mbeki’s book is designed to posit “what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development”. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you both the complete preface and a section of Mbeki’s chapter on BEE:

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Preface

The curator pointed to a large musket hanging on the wall – one of the items sold to Africans as part of the infamous Triangular Trade whereby manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to West Africa and exchanged for slaves, who were shipped to the Americas to grow sugar, cotton and tobacco that were then shipped back to Europe. This was mercantile capitalism in action.
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Author RW Johnson may be a lightning-rod for controversy, but his latest book, South Africa’s Brave New World, has attracted admiration from many whom one would have thought might take positions against it (including Shaun de Waal).

One of the most remarked-upon sections of the book is Johnson’s Christopher Hitchens-like “case against Joe Modise”, which implicates the latter in the 1993 assassination of SACP head and struggle hero Chris Hani.

Penguin Books has graciously agreed to let BOOK SA take a stick out of Johnson’s bundle of dynamite for this week’s magazine feature. The Hani – Modise chapter is too long to run in its entirety but even the sliver below will have you glued to your screen:
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Most people have heard of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” – child soldiers and orphans who were displaced during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 – 2005 – two million killed, according to Wikipedia). Many of the children were adopted by families in the United States and found themselves relocated to landscapes impossibly distant from those of central Africa. Think: Minneapolis in winter.

What is less well-known is that the “Lost Boys” didn’t only go to America. Other countries took them in, too – including South Africa, although, in SA’s case, it wasn’t in the open-armed fashion seen elsewhere. First, you had to walk here, which might take ten years or more. Then, you had to battle Home Affairs while finding a way to feed yourself. Eventually, if you worked hard and caught enough breaks, you could become someone. A successful businessman, for instance, or an author.

Aher Arop Bol became both. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you an excerpt from his memoir, The Lost Boy:

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(Note: Aher is seven or eight years old when he tells this story)

In July 1991 the SPLA platoon in our area was ordered to leave and move to the equatorial region of southern Sudan. Many minors were thinking of following the soldiers, rather than starving to death as so many had done in Ethiopia in 1987. We had strict orders not to leave our camp, but I, as an individual taking charge of my own life, was determined to escape.
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“We prefer former military,” says the man, Selezi, who is on private-security detail in Glenhazel, Johannesburg – a largely Jewish suburb that funds a private army to keep itself safe.

Kevin Bloom is visiting; he wants to know more about Selezi’s situation. Within a few moments he has adopted the guard’s point of view and surveys his surroundings like an outsider – a true outsider, not merely a white person from another suburb.

Funding a private army is, of course, one “way of staying” in South Africa – one solution for a community seeking to hold its place, one experience that South Africans of a certain group share. We first saw Glenhazel’s militarized GAP unit in Jonny Steinberg’s Thin Blue – but only its schemata, its technical outline. Here, in this excerpt from Bloom’s book, Ways of Staying, is a live-action close-up:
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You asked for it – and your wish is BOOK SA’s command, naturally!

Fiona Snyckers‘ Trinity Rising centres on South Africa’s very own “me generation” – as epitomised by one Trinity Luhabe, daughter of a struggle-hero-turned-BEE-magnate and the kind of girl who keeps “lose my virginity” on her to-do lists.

Let’s look in at Trinity on her first day at varsity:
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In the blurb for Naka Pillman’s An African Cameo we find this arresting sentence: ” A nationally renowned Japanese artist falls in love with an uncouth South African businessman. He promised her the world and flew her to Johannesburg, only to lock her up as a sex slave and to work as a servant in the flat of his mistress.”

The book is a fictionalised account of events that actually happened and, as Jane Rosenthal pointed out in her review, it “throws up the effect of apartheid and the racist mentality it ‘normalised’”.

The author, who lives in George, is ninety years old, and spins her tale with the grace of a calligrapher. Here is a small taste:
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Bryan Rostron’s Black Petals is being launched next week at the Book Lounge. There has been a low warbling of anticipation in SA Lit circles since details of the book were released back in February – not least because publishers Jacana have come up with another winner of a cover.

The novel is about an archivist, Macaulay Vogel, in search of a peculiar kind of truth, the truth of his former self, whom he doesn’t recognise in the police file that he discovers with his name on it.

Which brings us to the moment of today’s book excerpt: the moment when Macaulay Vogel comes face to face with “Macaulay Vogel”:
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The announcement, yesterday, of the publication of Sarah Lotz’s new novel, Exhibit A, caused the plates to rattle in London.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate a touch. But such was the outpouring of enthusiasm (on BOOK SA, on Facebook, in the literary ether) that we were left with no choice but to drop everything and work the phones to secure the very first peek inside book – expressly for your pleasure, dear reader.

Exhibit A, it seems, is being positioned within the family of SA crime novels currently marauding across the land – but on the fringes, playing the role of the clever cousin rather than the full-blooded scion. For a plot summary, click here; and for a taste, read on:
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