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Thuli Madonsela, the Apartheid Money Laundering Network and Hitmen at last week’s Open Book Festival

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Chaired by Jan-Jan Joubert, the discussion centred on Thandeka Gqubule, author of No Longer Whispering to Power: The Story of Thuli Madonsela, Michael Marchant, researcher at Open Secrets who discussed Apartheid Guns & Money, and Mark Shaw, author of Hitmen for Hire, who spoke about their research processes involved in writing their books. 

Read more: Thuli Madonsela - rebel, Makhadzi and fearless in the face of government retribribution

Thandeka Gqubule and Thuli Madonsela met more than three decades ago as anti-apartheid activists who were both imprisoned in Diepkloof Prison in the 1980s.

Fast forward post-democracy, the two courageous women have worked together to publish a book on Madonsela’s life and tenure as Public Protector. 

But the two women aren’t particularly friends, said Gqubule, who described Madonsela as a “kindred spirit” during the talk. “I’m someone who she met in jail and we kept on meeting over the years.”

For Gqubule, being a journalist was helpful in making the book accessible: “This is what you do all the time – you just write stories and you learn how to get to the gist of something very quickly so that the lady riding in the bus must be able to read the story and have an 'aha!' moment.”

In an aim to include sensory writing, Gqubule went to Soweto and tried to transport the reader there, describing the complete process as “a labour of love”.

On the complete other end of the spectrum, Shaw’s journey was not entirely smooth-sailing.    

“I sourced as a journalist – it’s not as hard as it sounds,” he said.

But Shaw understates the complexity of his task of having dealt with several unsavoury characters.

The people who have left the underworld, so to speak, but have retained their connections or people who act at the bottom ends of the underworld – like a taxi hitman – are less dangerous than people who have a lot to lose.

“It’s a question of getting people to tell their stories, and a lot more interviews were done than appear in the book, but all the interviews provided a story around which the underworld as is conceptualised in the book took place.”

Apart from a few legal issues and grey areas, the standard interview process was to ask as many people as possible to talk about their life stories. Shaw also stressed the importance of wanting to tell the story of the system and not of the individual murder.

“In the criminal economy, everyone wants to be more powerful than they actually are. Access was a negotiation. They know people who know people who know a hitman. It’s a set of intermediaries, a negotiated access.”

“Were you scared at times?” Joubert jokingly asked Shaw.

“I’m not going to answer that question too directly. The challenge of the book is that people with power in the criminal economy are not these guys at the bottom. And I think some of those people you can be scared of.

“The people who have left the underworld, so to speak, but have retained their connections or people who act at the bottom ends of the underworld – like a taxi hitman – are less dangerous than people who have a lot to lose. Those were my and our calculations around the interviews. And so those things are more concerning when writing something like this.”

Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit, written by Hennie van Vuuren and a book which Marchant played a part in researching, is a result of many years of hard work in identifying the donors and beneficiaries who fuelled the apartheid state despite the fact that it was a criminal state.

“One of the most challenging things as a research team was that we didn’t quite know what we were looking for," said Marchant.

"The idea was to look quite broadly into the sanctions period in South Africa  the late 1970s and 80s  and to try and work out the kind of networks that were created and whether there was a connection between those then and what we see now.  And we were primarily told, 'You’re not going to find anything [records] and therefore you’re not going to be successful.'"

What surprises people is the reluctance by democratic states to release records.

When they turned to the Access of Information Act and submitted around 50 requests to various government bodies, what they immediately found was blockage – a complete refusal to release any of the information. 

“What surprises people is the reluctance by democratic states to release records. There is a deep reluctance in the bureaucracy to give you access. So we build a democracy in South Africa on the understanding that apartheid was a crime against humanity, but if you go to the military archives or Armscor and ask them to release records, they say ‘no way, there’s not a chance’”.

After involving Pro Bono lawyers, documents were eventually released. And what was revealed was that there were thousands of pages of records left. 

“I remember sitting in Visagie Street in Pretoria in the military archive and having a thick manila folder put in front of us. We opened it and found documents of the People’s Republic of China sending weapons to Pretoria in 1980,” Marchant added.

Read more: 6 conversations we fell in love with at this year’s Open Book festival so far

While van Vuuren and Marchant faced an uphill battle, Shaw struggled with whom to trust. 

“The point about crooks is that they can be very engaging and very clever people in the discussion and so you build a relationship to get people talking. Does that mean I like what people do? Not at all. And then there’s the state-crime symbiosis and the intersection with the crime intelligence. 

“And the reason that it’s so hard to do is because you don’t know who’s an informer and who’s not, so the difficulty of writing a book like this is that you can’t honestly know some of those things. You can get a sense around why the state and others may act the way they do but there’s no way you’re going to get the information, and if you do, it’s very hard to use. So there’s a limitation in the book between what you know, and what you can use.

"And I think that’s really challenging because the temptation or sense is rather to take the story as a whole and the story as a whole is around the cost of hits to our democracy and the nature of the damage being done within that process.”

Gqubule joked that she found it difficult being on the panel because her research and writing process was essentially drama-free, although time was a challenge.

“Look, I mean it’s a book that I’m enormously happy I had the privilege to do, but the truth is that the process itself was the painless part. What was painful was actually watching this woman go through so much that many of us could never stomach – that was the painful part and conveying that as best as I could. 

“But the state of capture was a big problem because it was just never-ending.  You’re writing and then there are long court cases and you have a deadline going, and Thuli is trying to future-proof the report and save it from the bad guys, and then she asks for a judicial inquiry and we’re both running out of time, and then in the end she just announces, ‘I’m out”. 

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