Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
The premise of this political
thriller set in the near present of post-apartheid South Africa is land theft
by multinational corporations aided and abetted by state Institutions and
politicians. It avoids the “look what happens when you give control back to the
natives” trope, instead highlighting individual and endemic greed and
corruption.
Alagiah
clearly knows the territory and the novel is timely given Jacob Zuma’s fall
from power and the charges of corruption against him. The ‘hero’ is a 2nd generation, white
fugitive woman Lindi from apartheid times – as the book comments – at least her
privileged liberal family were able to get out of the country. It is in the family back story that provides
the link to those continuing the struggle against poverty and exploitation and
her family’s housemaid’s son, Kagiso, is deeply involved in acts of resistance
It
is when these acts of resistance turn violent, with the gruesome murder of one
of the scions of an apartheid era hero, that the divisions in society become
critical. Every ill is blamed on impotent and vulnerable immigrant
Mozambiquans, and the group to which Kagiso belongs, is pursued by every arm of
the state. The novel shows that little has changed for the majority of South
Africans – only for the newly wealthy oligarchs (for South Africa read Russia
post-Yeltsin). It is also clear that racism, nationalism and factionalism are
alive and well and only need a tiny spark to set-off the casual inter communal
hatreds which lie so close to the surface.
As
Lindi – now grown and back in a hugely changed South Africa as a representative
of a Chatham House type peace-broker organisation, becomes more deeply drawn
into the conspiracy and the state reaction that the relationship between her
and Kagiso strengthens and develops.
Ultimately
the pair secure hard evidence of the corruption which goes to the very top of
South Africa’s political elite and on seeing that little is likely to change,
Lindi alienates herself from her employers – who are already trying to distance
themselves from her actions, and releases the evidence to the world’s press.
The
novel is full of local colour, local vocabulary, local cuisine and an education
in southern African politics. It leaves a trail of bodies, some more innocent
than others and its resolution is one of a bleak conclusion – that for all the
upheaval, nothing fundamental is likely to have changed and Mandela’s dream has
yet to be realised. Thoroughly enjoyable and faced paced, it merits the blurb’s
description as exhilarating.
