The Emergency Bouzouki Player

The Emergency Bouzouki Player is the true story of a teenager railroaded into the South African army for two years of national service at the height of the Apartheid Border War. Brel's story begins in the small Cretan village of Sfakia, continues through Johannesburg where he was born in 1960, through growing up in seventies segregated society, before two years of military conscription, one dark and dusty year in Kimberley and another in Pretoria, ending with a new beginning on a rainy morning at Heathrow. ¿The cruelty, the absurdity and the mindlessness of life in the South African army are candidly described in this first-hand account by a young conscript who, to escape the infamous Diskobolos Infantry Training Camp, claimed he could play the bouzouki in a subterfuge that was to have unforeseen, sometimes comical and sometimes life-threatening consequences. Most of all, the Emergency Bouzouki Player depicts the way in which hope can carry a young person through the worst of times¿

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