Description
From the acclaimed author of The List and Songs and Secrets, At Fire Hour is a sweeping, soulful novel that tells the story of Bhekisizwe Makhatini, a young black South Africa writer, detained and forced into exile, who undergoes a creative writing masters in the UK and military training with the ANC in Angola and in the Soviet Union, and faces the angst of choosing between his writing and his passionate desire to pit his new military skills against the apartheid regime. But Makhatini faces another challenge – suspicion by his ANC comrades that he was released from detention in return for spying on the ANC, that lingers throughout his exile life and beyond. But, is he a sellout? In the words of Mandla Langa: Despite its celebration of other writers, musicians, poets – the cultural workers, to use the parlance of the liberation movement – this, in the end is a story of betrayal and intrigue and, like Gilder’s earlier works, especially, The List, is a novel that dredges up the shameful betrayals by people whose actions precipitated incalculable losses and reversals. The writer takes a lot of risks in telling this story, going deep into his imagination to recreate a series of landscapes which form the staging grounds for acts of courage, love, commitment and of course, the very obverse side of this coin. For verisimilitude, he recreates platforms, such as the Culture and Resistance Conference that took place in 1982 in Gaborone, Botswana; Culture in Another South Africa (CASA) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1987, to name a few. The scenes are believable for the simple reason that the writer was present in almost all these arenas and captures the texture of the interactions among the vast gallery of players. He reconstructs conversations between the attendees, for instance, in Amsterdam writers such as the late Lewis Nkosi and Wally Serote exchange views with Bheki Makhathini and his partner Pumla, an underground agent of the ANC.
