World of Shadows

By Vincent Gray

In the dying days of apartheid a Communist detained by the security police finds herself in a world of shadows, smoke and mirrors, where truth and falsehood seemed to merge seamlessly. It was also a world in which men and women lied shamelessly, and betrayal became the reality of not only the counter insurgency game but also the ultimate inexorable destiny of the revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Gray
• Release date: Dec 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370175550

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.

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World of Shadows

By Vincent Gray

Copyright © 2017 Vincent Gray

Smashwords 2017 Edition

First 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: 9781370175550

Dedicated to my wife Melodie and my daughter

Prelude

My name is Hannah Petronella Hendrina Wilhelmina Zeeman. I am no longer ashamed of my name. I am no longer uncomfortable with the fact that my family became Anglicized Afrikaners. My great grandfather died fighting in the anti-colonial Anglo Boer War against the British. He died in Ladysmith. I am also a direct descendent of a Mr Ambroos Zeeman who settled in the Cape of Good Hope in 1661. He was a slave trader connected with the Dutch East India Company or Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie which was founded by the Dutch in 1602.

I am one of those white South Africans who have never been fully Afrikaans or fully English. I grew up living in the interstitial spaces of two languages, two cultures and two white ethnicities, while never been fully at home in either language or culture or ethnic group. So in a way I am one of those white South Africans, an umlungu as they call us, who do not really have a mother tongue or an unambiguous sense of ethnic identity. By sheer contingency and not by choice I have become predominantly English speaking. So in a real sense English has become my adopted language. In South Africa, like many Indians, Coloureds, Whites and now also many Blacks, I have also become ‘English’ without having any intimate or special kind of ancestral connection to England. My perception of England, an island which I only visited on a few brief occasions, has been shaped and coloured more by the books that I have read than by my visits to the UK. England never felt like home in any sense of the word. I felt more foreign in England than in Spain or France or Holland. Outside of Africa I felt most at home in France, a country that I have had the opportunity to visit regularly. I do not feel European and I do not feel any connection with Europe. Except for Africa I am a foreigner everywhere in the world.

I am not really English nor do I wish to be English. Maybe English speakers outnumber the English. English as a world language belongs to anyone who cares enough about the language to claim it as their own. English knows no nationality, race, colour, creed, country, culture and ethnicity. English as a language is at home in the world no matter where that home happens to be. English has colonized my mind. English is a language which assimilates foreign words and concepts. It is a language which has colonized the minds of natives and aboriginals filling their minds with words that embody foreign concepts and meanings which cannot be decolonized. So I reconciled myself to speaking English as my language. I don’t really know why I am expressing these thoughts about English.

Before we moved from Stilfontein to Hotazel I remembered that my mom said something about the mine houses in Hotazel that struck me as being quite odd especially as a child. She said that the houses in Hotazel had floors covered with Marley tiles. As a young child I could not understand why she seemed to be so thrilled that our new home soon to be in Hotazel had floors that were covered with Marley tiles. I tried to imagine what a Marley tiled floor looked like. For some weird reason the word ‘Marley’ made me think of marbles. I developed this mental image that the surfaces of the floors of the Hotazel houses had marbles stuck into concrete.

Our house in Stilfontein had polished wooden parquet flooring which I liked. I was not very happy about leaving Stilfontein, especially leaving my room which had just been painted pink. I was also leaving behind the newly built Strathvaal Primary School.

My older brother Malcolm was ecstatic. If anyone wanted to escape from Stilfontein it was my brother. For some unexplainable and mysterious reason he had decided to fling fist sized clods of red earth at the white washed walls of the home of Dr Simon Cohen our neighbour. Dr Cohen a medical doctor was a general practitioner in Stilfontein. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in the neat little house next to our home. His wife, a sophisticated Jewess, as I remember her, was also a housewife whose main job was to manage the domestic servant and to look after their two daughters.

As a friend of her daughters I was a frequent visitor in their home. We would listen for hours to LPs of The Snow Goose and Alice in Wonderland on their brand new Pilot Radiogram. Compared to my mother Mrs Cohen was a wonderful mother to her two daughters and an excellent host to me as a regular visitor, a gentile intruder into her home. Malcolm was mom’s favourite. Elsabe and I often felt like second class children. My mother was always on our case. The bonds between my mother and me and Elsabe were never strong as far as I can remember. There were the odd moments when my mother become our wonderful friend and indulged our ever wish.

An act of vandalism had been committed and the suspect was Malcolm.

I had to go and find Malcolm who had disappeared off the face of the earth after committing the deed. Malcolm’s friend Kevin and I set out on a search for Malcolm while my hysterical mother Mrs Amanda Zeeman was having one of her dramatic cadenzas. Kevin reckoned that Malcolm was playing pin ball at a Café up the road on the bult (hill) which was next door to the old Strathvaal Primary School where I had been first enrolled as a grade one pupil. The memories and smells of that first year of school are still vivid in my mind, the apricot jam sandwiches wrapped in wax wrap, the little plastic bottle of Oros orange juice, the little black slate board, pencils, exercise books and the English reader.

Every day I would walk home down the bult along the tar road with my big brother Malcolm and his gang of friends. Every day we had to contend with the harassment of a pet crow that would be waiting to ambush us.

We saw Malcolm coming the downhill walking with his hands in his pockets quite nonchalantly as if he did not have a care in the world. My instruction from my mother was to tell Malcolm to come home immediately. I was to say nothing else. Kevin wanted to embellish on my mom’s message with other threatening information like for instance that he must come home immediately because the doctor was going to give him an injection.

Before I could inform Malcolm that mom wants him to come home immediately Kevin blurted out that Dr Cohen was going to give him an injection. Malcolm instantly put two and two together and his face went ashen white with apprehension. I became livid with anger at his stupidity