The List

April 2020I tell this story now in the knowledge - sound, I'm sure - that the telling is too late. Too late to go back. Too late to tell it again, differently ... I tell this story now because I was there. Because I am safe now - relatively, anyway - and once more in drizzling London, an obscure survivor.Although conceived and birthed well before the ANC's December 2017 elective conference and the changes of the guard that ensued, The List imagines a 'New Dawn' for South Africa in the closing years of the 2010s. But is it dawn or dusk?Rumours have abounded since the early days of South African democracy, of a list given to Nelson Mandela by apartheid securocrats of their agents infiltrated into the upper echelons of the ANC during the struggle years.The List tells the story of a group of veterans of MK, of ANC intelligence and of the post-apartheid intelligence service, who are formed into a secret task team by the newly-elected president to investigate the possibility of such remnants of apartheid security threatening to obstruct the radical changes that he and his team are planning.The story follows these veterans and their nemeses through the struggle years, exile, the MK camps and into the years of democracy and hope, disillusion and hope again. It observes while the struggle veterans painstakingly attempt to pick through the detritus of the old regime in the new, but just as the moment of optimism begins to blossom, the task team uncovers a ghastly betrayal. Is it too late to save the president and the country?