Nonhlanhla’s Silhouette

By Vincent Gray

Under the veil of night multiracial love in apartheid South Africa with all its painfulness exists as a transient shadow for two women before whithering away in the dawn of a new day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Gray
• Release date: Aug 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370566891

Vincent Gray

As a son of a miner, I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg. I matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, I was conscripted into the South African Defence Force for compulsory national military service when I was 17 years old. After my military service, I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree I worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. As an obligatory member of the South African Citizen Miltary Force, I was called up to do 3-month camps on the 'Border' which was the theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War'. In between postgraduate university studies I also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales rep. In my career as an academic, I was a molecular biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I lectured courses in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and evolutionary biology. On the research side, I was involved in genomics, and plant and microbial biotechnology. I also conducted research into the genomics of strange and weird animals known as entomopathogenic nematodes. I retired in 2019, however, I am currently an honorary professor at the University of the Witwaterand and I also work as a research writing consultant for the University of Johannesburg.

Book preview

Nonhlanhla’s Silhouette

A very short story

By

Vincent Gray

Copyright © 2017 Vincent Gray

Smashwords 2017 Edition

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters developed in this novel are fictional creations of the writer’s imagination and are not modelled on any real persons. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 9781370566891

Dedicated to my amazing wife Melodie and my wonderful daughter Ruth

I had just finished the first year of my PhD at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and had travelled up to Hotazel in the last week of November 1979. At the beginning of November Samantha MacGuire had been served with banning orders and had immediately skipped the country crossing the border into Botswana and flying to Luanda in Angola. The Party instructed us who had escaped the dragnet to go to ground, to lie low and