ARMED AND DANGEROUS: FROM UNDERCOVER STRUGGLE TO FREEDOM by Ronnie Kasrils (Mayibuye/Jonathan Ball )
When this autobiography of Deputy Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils first appeared in 1993, it was a bestseller. Five years on, with a new section detailing the author’s experiences in government, the question is: will it repeat its resounding success?
Kasrils’s life is a dramatic account of a “Yeoville boykie” who moved into progressive white circles in the 1950s and early 1960s, eventually joining Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). We read of the early – by most military standards amateur – attempts at sabotage, his exile and training in the Soviet Union, and more sophisticated guerrilla campaigns,with Kasrils rising in the ranks of MK .
Kasrils was recruited into the South African Communist Party and did well there, rising to its central committee. But it is as an MK leader and later his role in the Ministry of Defence that is the focus of his narrative. In the early 1990s, he found himself on the run again, even after the unbanning of the ANC, because of his role in Operation Vula.
The new part of the book details his life as a Cabinet minister. As deputy defence minister, he was responsible, with his superior Joe Modise, in trying to integrate the various armies (South African Defence Force, homelands and guerrilla armies) into one.
Kasrils’s style is pacy, witty and beguiling. I have heard it said that the book should really be called Disarming and Charming – and those with a cynical view of the national defence force might even venture Unarmed and Harmless!
Yet there is a very serious side to all this: the long and difficult struggle against apartheid, guerrilla campaigns that sometimes went seriously wrong and in which people – on all sides – were killed. Very little has been written about MK; for many readers this is probably the first introduction to what it was like to be a freedom fighter.
As in any autobiography, there is much that Kasrils does not say about himself here. A second edition, I had hoped, would expand on Kasrils’s earlier life. With a few exceptions this is not the case.
Will this new edition be as successful as the last? I hope so. If Kasrils loses his job, he should consider the career of a thriller writer.
THE TRANSFER OF POWER IN SOUTH AFRICA by TRH Davenport (David Philip)
We are fast amassing a vast literature on the 1994 transition. Rodney Davenport, professor emeritus of history at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, adds his contribution – based on a series of lectures – in this slim volume. It is the ideal introduction to the subject for a newcomer.
The book is carefully researched and clearly and concisely written. Of particular value is the final chapter, a sober account of the period until 1997.
But Davenport is so concerned to tell the story that the crucial theoretical questions that are starting to be raised (the origins of 1990, whether 1994 was the outcome of an elite pact …) tend to be underplayed or ignored.
THE TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL by Rezak Hukanovic (Abacus)
We have all heard of the civil war and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps we have even seen some of the pictures. But I suspect this will hardly prepare us for the horror that lies in this short book.
Rezak Hukanovic – a journalist, broadcaster and poet in Prijedor, Bosnia – tells his own story in the third person. It is an account of how a seemingly normal town, where Serbs, Muslims and Croats had coexisted happily, was ripped apart. A Serb militia (including neighbours)descends, destroying property and taking Muslims and Croats prisoner. In the Serb concentration camps, prisoners are tortured and murdered as a matter of course.
All this is told in graphic but often understated detail. Finishing the book, I felt a lot like one of the camp survivors, who cried: “Lord, may you never forgive them!”
SWEARING: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF FOUL LANGUAGE, OATHS AND PROFANITY IN ENGLISH by Geoffrey Hughes (Penguin)
Anyone who has ever driven around Johannesburg with me knows that all my new year’s resolutions and aspirations to give up swearing for Lent come to nought when some ******** dices in front of me. So it’s really useful to know where these oft-used words come from – you can tell your friends you are a devotee of Elizabethan English.
In this book, at last in accessible paperback, Geoffrey Hughes does a very able job of showing the origins and developments of foul language in English. He shows how cultural mores have shifted the bounds of acceptability in this area; some words which today are innocuous wereoutrageous in bygone eras.
For the recovering victim of English literature at school, there is an added bonus: detailed examples of Elizabethan profanity from Shakespeare – all those phrases your teacher never explained.