Clinics and kalachs

The South African soldiers rush out of the cold darkness, weapons in hand, yelling in Afrikaans. Next moment they get me face down on the car bonnet with a gun at my head and my life hangs in the balance. The seconds that follow are strangely long, my whole life going past at the speed of light: the unreal Angola of tailing sessions and bazookas, the hiding places dug right on the edge of Pretoria, the Zimbabwe of savannahs and secret meetings, the clinics in townships that are real ghettos...

Mandela's men are trusting me with high-risk missions, but is all going to be wrecked by these two thugs bursting in on me? Furious to have let myself be caught so easily, they won't think a white foreigner could be on the side of the "black communist Kaffirs"

New images crowd into my mind: the Kanak school at the end of the world, the pavements of death in Dacca, the Creole Cayenne and its Chicago slums, other Equatorial scenes lit up by African colours, the joy of its musics, the magic of its forests, the craziness of its women with their arched bodies, and above all the little Zulu girl whose laughter brightened up so many of the hard times I lived through down here... "The vibrant testimony of a ANC combattant in the fight against racism and apartheid in South-Africa"

Dettagli