Apartheid's Friends

Unfortunately, not as good as I hoped it would be. I needed a relatively straightforward history of the secret police in South Africa; this book’s writing is a bit too jumbled to be straightforward. Part of this may be a function of the type and volume of material that has been made publicly available in South Africa – Sanders is still clearly relying on journalistic accounts and memoirs (both of which are obviously contested by the government itself). So maybe for the moment, this is the best we can do. For what it is, the book is fine – I certainly learned a lot, and the revelations about the activities of South Africa’s apartheid-era death squads are chilling. The book demonstrates how truly warped, paranoid, and desperate white South African society was.