To celebrate her 14 year clean and sober birthday, award winning journo Melinda Ferguson takes a brand new Ferrari out to test drive for the day. Seven hours later the car lies smashed into a million pieces, beyond recognition and repair. The crash sets an epic journey in motion, where Ferguson must navigate her way out of a cul de sac of trauma and scandal. ...
'I remembered how, when I was a small child supposed to be asleep, my mother would slip into bed behind me and hold me. She would be trembling. She couldn’t hide it no matter how young I was. ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep,’ she’d say, as if that would save us.' Brent Meersman’s poignant memoir of a humble and eccentric upbringing in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1970s and ’80s reads as a stirring eulogy to his mother, and a vivid snapsho ...
As a young underground cadre in 1980s Durban, Moe Shaik endured detention, following orders for the good of the organisation. Little did he know that this stint in the police cells would lead to his lifelong relationship with The Nightingale, a Special Branch policeman turned enemy secret agent whose files were so accurate, Oliver Tambo named them The Bible. Shaik morphs from being a timid optometrist to leading a critical, high-tech intelligenc ...
When Robert McBride was sentenced to death, he turned to the public gallery in court and said: ‘Freedom is just around the corner. I am leaving you at the corner – and you must take that corner to find freedom on the other side.’ As the guard moved in, he raised his fist and shouted: ‘The struggle continues till Babylon falls!’ It was 1987: the time of ‘total onslaught’. The trial of the MK unit that planted the Magoo's bomb on the Durban b ...
Die ontvoering van baba Zephany Nurse uit die kot langs haar ma se hospitaalbed het die hele Suid-Afrika aangegryp. Haar desperate ouers het herhaaldelik gepleit dat sy veilig terugbesorg word, maar daar was geen teken van die baba nie. Vir 17 jaar lank, op haar verjaarsdag, het die Nurse-gesin kerse aangesteek en gehoop en gebid. 'n Klipgooi van die Nurse-gesin af het die 17-jarige Miche Solomon pas met matriek begin. Sy het 'n kerel ...
The kidnapping of baby Zephany Nurse from the cot beside her mother's hospital bed made headline news. Desperate pleas from her parents to return her safely went unanswered. There was no trace of the baby. For seventeen years, on her birthday, the Nurses lit candles and hoped and prayed. Living not far away from the Nurses, 17-year-old Miche Solomon had just started Matric. She had a boyfriend. She had devoted parents. She was thinking abou ...
‘Strangers pulling their eyes slant at me when they walked by. They’d pretend to be Chinese and make fake nasal-pitched noises that they thought passed for an Asian language.’ Ming-Cheau Lin’s family emigrated from Tainan, Taiwan, to South Africa when she was three years old. Growing up in the '90s, in the largely Afrikaans Bloemfontein, within a small East Asian community, she was always the outsider. Too ‘yellow’ for the whites, but ‘not ...
'If you want to take the system down, provide a better alternative at least. At heart I’m an engineer. I want to encourage people to fix things, not to raise false hopes.' Mteto Nyati knew years ago as a schoolboy in Mthatha, working behind the counter at his mother’s trading store, that he wanted to fix and build things. After completing his studies in Mechanical Engineering at Natal University, he turned down a Rhodes scholarship and ...
