Review: Archie Henderson

The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben Macintyre (Penguin)

The names Oleg Gordievsky and Aldrich Ames are well known to aficionados of espionage. Gordievsky is the most famous spy of the Cold War and Ames its most famous American traitor.

They are contrasting characters in other ways too.

Gordievsky, whose father was a senior KGB officer and whose brother was a deep-penetration agent in the West, was a child of communism. But he became repelled by his family’s ideology. It began with the Berlin Wall which, as a young Russian agent posted to East Berlin he saw going up in 1961. Seven years later he was further appalled by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968. When a Czech friend from KGB spy school defected to Canada, Gordievsky decided to throw in his lot with the West. Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

The Rise & Demise of the Afrikaners, by Hermann Giliomee (Tafelberg)

Not so long ago Afrikaners – and Afrikaans – were baas. Their culture and language were forced down everyone’s throats. It was done in desperation because Afrikaner nationalists were not confident when they came to power, especially the Hard Nats of 1948. It was understandable but was to backfire badly: their language was forever linked to the party’s racism, making redemption difficult. It was a great opportunity missed for a rich and beautiful taal.

It all began with the fear of assimilation by the English, their conquerors in the Anglo-Boer war at the turn of the previous century. The fear was genuine: in 1915, just 13 years after the war had ended, only 15% of Afrikaans children progressed further than standard 5 (grade 7) and only 4% were fluent in English. Afrikaners were worried their children would not be able to compete in an emerging modern economy, or would be overwhelmed by Milner’s policy of Anglicisation. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s insurgents, collaborators and the Security Police, by Jacob Dlamini (Harvard University Press)

To be in the Terrorist Album meant you were fair game.

Those are the words of the notorious apartheid spy Craig Williamson, who was behind the murders of Jeanette Schoon Curtis and Ruth First.

Or as author, academic and former journalist Jacob Dlamini puts it: “To be on its pages was to be marked for death.”

In 1993, a year before the first democratic elections, the apartheid government ordered the destruction of a huge body of state records and documents “in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence and thereby sanitise the history of oppressive rule”, according to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Much was incinerated in Iscor’s industrial furnaces in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Among the documents burnt were 500 copies of the Terrorism Album, a folder of some 7 000 photographs of people the apartheid government deemed to be “terrorists”. In fact all you had to do to get into the album was to leave South Africa illegally. Copies were sent to police stations all around the country. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell (HarperCollins/ Jonathan Ball)

In these times of the revelations of the appetites of the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and the #Me Too campaigns, My Dark Vanessa is a tricksy novel to get your head around.

In 2000 fifteen-year-old boarding school pupil Vanessa Wye has a sexual relationship with her 42-year-old English teacher. She is flattered, excited and convinced that she is in love – and is loved in return. But while she doesn’t believe their relationship is wrong, she’s savvy enough to know it has to be a secret.

The dilemma is: is someone a victim if she doesn’t believe she is one? Even 17 years later, as an adult, she still loves Jacob Strane, and doesn’t think he hurt her. And yet…

Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

My Mother, My Madness, by Colleen Higgs (deep south)

Very early in this brief journal-based memoir, Colleen Higgs writes: “My whole life has felt like a long deeply unsatisfying love affair with my mother.  She is the beloved who doesn’t love back.”

How hard it must be, to assume the care of a person who is not really interested in you, but demands a lot of you. And Higgs tries to be a dutiful daughter, while running a business – the publishing company Modjaji – and dealing with her not entirely satisfactory husband and her young (entirely satisfactory) daughter.

Continue reading →

Review: Archie Henderson

Sons of Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail, by Stephen Taylor (Yale)

Stephen Taylor is hardly known in South African literary circles, yet he was born here, trained here as a journalist and worked on the Rand Daily Mail in its glory days. Three of his eight books are about South Africa: Shaka’s Children, the Caliban Shore (about the wreck of the Grosvenor off Pondoland and its castaways) and Defiance (the first full history of Lady Anne Barnard).

More recently he has become, as The Times of London reported this year, “an acclaimed naval historian”. Following his researches on Britain’s naval history, this is the book he has long wanted to write. It’s about a time when Britain began to rule the waves and about the men who enabled that rule: the Jack Tars of the Royal Navy who did the heavy lifting while heroes like Nelson took much of the credit. Continue reading →