Madiba is alive in us

Happy Sindane is dead. Stoned to death, the papers say. Somebody should have seen that this young man was a threat to himself, emerging as a teenager out of an alleged kidnapping as a baby, claiming white and black parentage, and embarking on all kinds of destructive behaviour in the north-east of the country.

Just another day in the new South Africa. Nelson Mandela will also die (there, I uttered the unspeakable), like all of us, and even Spinning Mac has given up on that dull one-liner of "routine check-ups" for a 94-year old.

What I cannot understand is this anxiety in some of white South Africa that "After Mandela" (there is even a book by that name) pent-up black anger will finally be unleashed on whites. What utter nonsense. Sometimes I think there are still white folk in this country waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I gained a new respect for Mandela, the normal human being, after reading the riveting book by the recently deceased Amina Cachalia with the title taken from an overused line in a Seamus Heaney poem, When Hope and History Rhyme. So now we know Madiba had a lifelong crush on this strikingly beautiful woman, and you must have a heart of stone not to be moved by Amina's recollection of how he ran his fingers through her hair and kissed her passionately. Lord have mercy. What I love about this book is its simple honesty; where else would you read in the disinfected annals of the Struggle about Adelaide Tambo's love for other people's credit cards?

By contrast, Frank Chikane's latest book - Things That Could Not Be Said - is vexingly frustrating. Let me first say I am a huge fan of the rev.

When I anguished as a young man to connect the fervour of evangelical faith to the struggle for freedom, his life offered a powerful testimony of how to reconcile these two urges. The problem is that this book - a sequel to Eight Days in September - might as well have been written as the official defence of the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, blindly standing by the policies of a regime that escalated Aids deaths among the black poor. Chikane's defence of our policies toward Zimbabwe is equally bizarre. Those things were better left unsaid.

A good person can write bad books, and a good book can reveal a bad person. That is the case with McIntosh Polela. His brilliant monograph, My Father, My Monster, is a heart-rending tale of a young man's journey to find and confront the killer of his mother - his dad. I wept when I first read that book.

But what has become clear is that this is a troubled man who reveals himself as such in the social media.

As a spokesman for the Hawks, Polela was mildly censured for wishing kwaito star Molemo "Jub Jub" Maarohanye a jar of Vaseline on his way to prison for killing a group of schoolboys with his car in 2010. He made the news again with allegations of poaching protected species of wildlife in KwaZulu-Natal. It is tough being in public life, and I gained a new respect for Riah Phiyega, the national police commissioner, for taking the stand at the Marikana commission of inquiry to face tough questions day after day by celebrity lawyers all too conscious of the cameras recording their antics.

But this is democracy, and I wish the president would understand the same - that there will be tough questions on our involvement in the Central African Republic. It is not good politics to complain at a memorial service for our soldiers that "everybody wants to run the country" in the wake of criticism of our adventures in a faraway land.

The citizen body count is too high, Mr President, from Marikana to Bangui to Ficksburg, and it is happening on your watch.

It is Marikana that produced, by the way, the worst book of the season, Marikana: A View From the Mountain and A Case to Answer. Here the rush to publish has generated a superficial and jaundiced account of a complex tragedy.

With the Cachalia book my recommended winter reading is the collection of writings by Neville Alexander published shortly after his death, Thoughts on the New South Africa. It gives honest reasons why we can still hope.