Imraan Coovadia | Of vials and violence

Non-fiction Award

Criteria:

The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

We asked Imraan Coovadia, author of The Poisoners: On South Africa's Toxic Past (Umuzi), some questions about his book which is shortlisted for the non-fiction award

What led you to write The Poisoners: On South Africa's Toxic Past?

My father told me a story about being at a dinner with a high-ranking ANC official, Peggy Nkonyeni, probably around a decade ago. Nknonyeni's staff demanded that a taster be provided for such an important personage. I tried to understand what they were frightened of, and in many ways stumbled onto the stories of Rhodesian and South African use of illegal weapons.

What were your sources for the research?

Many of them were in UCT's Jagger Library which, like parliament, may have burnt down due to negligence. I cite them in the several hundred footnotes in the book: court records and transcripts (some of which had to be tracked down), memoirs of special forces soldiers, scientific studies, true crime treatments.

You take us through this dark world of poisons and toxins and how they have seeped into Southern Africa's politics and race relations. There are many ways international forces were involved. What is the scariest/most notable example of this?

That in the late 1980s I was on the same flights from Johannesburg to New York and back on which American collaborators were transporting vials of deadly viruses.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

It tries to tell the truth, for one thing, and understands that stories, like the ones Jacob Zuma tells about being poisoned, can be used to mislead as well as to reveal, to break a society into pieces as much as to put it together, like the self-deprecating stories Mandela would tell.

Our society is corrupted from the ground up: the poor, the rich, black, white, powerful, and the powerless, left-wing and right, lawyers and trade unionists. We lie and accept lies as a people more easily than probably any other people on Earth. Ultimately, this acceptance of lying is a matter of opinion. Over time, I think, the best way to treat opinion is through writing and argument, setting an example of seeking truth.

What was the most difficult part of writing it?

Trying to understand the intricacies of the [Wouter] Basson trial. Translating and analysing the legal arguments and counterarguments, as well as reading the details of many of these atrocities.

What impression do you want readers to take away after reading this?

I want them to understand how we, in SA — and in any situation where group identities are in play — so quickly lost a sense of good and evil. Maybe what's necessary to get it back.

Do politicians pay enough attention to history — and should they?

They should pay attention to judgments of utility. History, like stories, is more often used to mislead than guide. We need politicians who pay attention to basic economic reasoning and economic history, and which societies have successfully reduced poverty, not half-baked criticisms of economic theory and Africanist dogma.

What do you believe are the greatest challenges we are facing now in SA, and how should they be tackled?

Poverty and violence. Poverty needs to be tackled by a conservative measure: the free market. Violence needs to be tackled by a radical measure, something that has never been explicitly attempted by any society: training an entire people into peacefulness. In other words: Adam Smith and Gandhi rather than Marx and Fanon.

Click here to buy The Poisoners.