'Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.' I was supposedly fulfilling a lifelong dream, inspired by Joseph Conrad's epic voyage more than a century earlier, when he wrote: The captain, drunk and witless, had steered the ungainly, overcrowded craft into an island and we had narrowly escaped death by drowning or being devoured by the monstrously big crocodiles that patrol the murky waters in search of prey. The boat-whores had been singularly luckless, makeshift hair salons had no clients and kiosk proprietors didn't even light their paraffin stoves. None of the passengers had slept the night before. In the space of twenty-four hours, the MS Tshopo went from being exactly that to a mute and crippled disaster in the making. THOSE WHO FARED ON CONGO RIVER BOATS BEFORE ME DESCRIBED them as stinking, noisy, overheated, overcrowded African markets. „Although a dark and depressing portrayal, I found this book „unputdownable“, the best passages being where Pauw gets into the psyche and the reasoning of his 'devils'.“Ī cockroach cannot give birth to a butterflyĪ wife for the baas, tontonto for the native Pauw has travelled the length and breadth of Africa to bring television viewers stories about conflict, corruption and human rights abuses.Ĭurrently executive producer of the hard-hitting weekly television series Special Assignment, he has won numerous South African and international journalism awards, twice being named CNN’s African Journalist of the Year and also winning the Vodacom Journalist of the Year award. He has published two books on the subject: In the Heart of the Whore and Into the Heart of Darkness. Having cut his teeth on investigative journalism in print, Jacques Pauw moved into the electronic media in 1994.Ī founder member of Vrye Weekblad, he lifted the veil on Vlakplaas and ‘dirty tricks’ funded and authorised by the apartheid government. Readers are taken behind the scenes of sensational news reports with compassion, humour and occasional cynicism and emerge in the knowledge that, even if it’s true that there is nothing new out of Africa, the writer has found fresh ways to present time-honoured tales of love, life, misery and mortality. Pauw’s stories range from South Africa to Rwanda, from Sierra Leone and the Sudan to Mozambique. What he found was a rich array of personalities and panoply of stories, ranging from the profoundly tragic to the intensely personal. ![]() "We are worried that they will not help victims' relatives with the truth about what happened to their loved ones for closure once they are out," she said.Hardcover, 15x23 cm, 400 pages, several colour photosįor more than a decade, Jacques Pauw has traversed his native continent in pursuit of warlords and drug traffickers, child soldiers and charlatans, adventure and anarchy. Marjorie Jobson, the head of the Khulumani support group formed by victims of apartheid atrocities, said De Kock and Barnard were each believed to have been involved in about 200 murders. I will never forgive him until he tells why my son had to die like that and who decided his tragic fate," she said. " is a short time to serve for murder," Friedman said.Ĭatherine Mlangeni, whose son, lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, was killed when he put on a set of bomb-rigged headphones sent by De Kock in February 1991, said she gets sick every time she hears his name. ![]() Justice and Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha will announce his decision on Barnard's parole application today.įormer Vlakplaas boss Eugene de Kock and Chris Hani killer Clive Derby-Lewis are also expecting word on their parole applications. ![]() More than 25 years later, Friedman wants "nothing to do with the person who killed someone I loved".īarnard was sentenced in 1998 to two life terms and a further 63 years for Webster's murder and the attempted murder of former cabinet minister Dullah Omar. The couple had just arrived at their home in Troyeville, Johannesburg, after a morning run and Webster was about to open the back of their bakkie to let their dogs out when apartheid assassin Ferdi Barnard shot him. These were the last words Maggie Friedman heard from her partner, anti-apartheid activist David Webster, as he lay dying in their driveway on May 1 1989. "I've been shot by a shotgun, get an ambulance."
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