Imraan Coovadia’s new book examines how poison has shaped political affairs in Southern Africa.
Revolution and Non-Violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela. Both books are dependent on extensive archival research and, to put it crudely, the former is about saints and the latter is about mass murderers. These are books that meditate on the question of good and evil.
Mandela inspired people in their personal lives, and I think when we see people at the top behaving badly, it does the opposite thing. It inspires people negatively. I also have to say, reading through those three archives, thinking about them, piecing together whatever I pieced together from them, was a very moving experience. It’s moving to see people trying to be good in a country like this, which in some ways, teaches you to suspend the need to be good.
So, I think underlying this, my intuition was here is a way into this very troubling moral fact about ourselves. We are kind of disintegrating because we can’t keep a hold on what’s right and what’s wrong, and how did our framework disappear? I was just like: let’s try to understand what’s happening here. Let’s set out the facts and establish the chronology and let’s see what we can know. What do we know for sure? What can we say probably happened? What can we infer if you set out the different categories of knowledge and try to put it all together?
But from there, one thing led to another, and then I started realising I could follow this thread through all kinds of different texts, novels, nonfiction, narratives of special forces, soldiers, et cetera. But then I also realised that the archive I was looking at was very, very compromised. But what’s very interesting is that there are so few political consequences, or memories of what happened, and how we let all these people down. Many of our heroes, who are in the cabinet now or in the political system of the state-owned enterprises; they lived through a government that denied and delayed treatment for hundreds of thousands, let’s face it, probably millions of people. We probably have a million young people growing up without their parents because of that.
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