Thatcher, Apartheid South Africa, & Brink's A Dry White Season

From yesterday's BBC article "Thatcher's role 'in saving Nelson Mandela':"

Did Margaret Thatcher play a role in helping to save Nelson Mandela's life? That is the remarkable claim made by one of the former South African president's closest friends, Ahmed Kathrada.

"Her word did count - I'm sure of it," Mr Kathrada told me, on hearing of the death of Baroness Thatcher. Between 1963 and 1964, Nelson Mandela was a defendant at the Rivonia trial, accused of trying to overthrow the apartheid government. Mr Kathrada was one of nine other men in the dock with him. The death penalty was initially sought by prosecutors, but was later changed to life imprisonment. Mr Mandela eventually spent 27 years in prison. Mr Kathrada was released a few months earlier in October 1989.

After the end of apartheid and the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, Mr Kathrada sometimes took visiting delegations and VIPs on guided tours of the notorious Robben Island jail where he and Mr Mandela had been incarcerated. "I had the opportunity to accompany [Margaret Thatcher] a few years ago," said Mr Kathrada. "She assured me that she had played a positive role during our trial."

"We were expecting a death sentence. We were well aware that there was all sorts of pressure from South Africa and abroad - pressure from people not necessarily agreeing with" the ANC's policies, he said.

The most popular comments on the article vehemently disagree that Thatcher saved Mandela. Here's of the highest rated comments:

This is historical revisionism. [...] The Thatcher Government resisted international pressure to impose economic sanctions on the apartheid country and she regarded the ANC as a 'typical terrorist organization' as late as 1987.

For a novel set in apartheid South Africa, try A Dry White Season by André P. Brink:

Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies--until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair--a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

Oscar Pistorius case & Gordimer's The House Gun

From Friday's BBC story "Oscar Pistorius granted bail in Reeva Steenkamp case:"

South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who faces murder charges over the fatal shooting of his girlfriend, has been granted bail after a four-day hearing. The Paralympic champion denies murder, saying he shot Reeva Steenkamp thinking she was an intruder at his home.

I also found interesting the NPR article "In South Africa, Crime And Violence Are Permanent Headlines," which goes into some of the deeper themes involved in the case:

No place has been as riveted by Oscar Pistorius and the Valentine's Day shooting death of his girlfriend as South Africa. But even before this sensational story burst into the headlines, South Africans were fiercely debating issues that are more or less permanent fixtures in this country — crime, and violence against women. Crime has always been high in poorly policed black areas, and whites have felt it more in recent years as well. It seems most everyone has been victimized, and many more than once. Well-off South Africans live behind high walls, they pay private security firms to patrol their neighborhoods, they have state-of-the-art security systems, and some of them are armed. So when Pistorius said in court that he mistook his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp for an intruder breaking into his home, he was offering an explanation that struck a chord with many of his countrymen. Yet South Africa is also a place where violence against women is out of control, from rape on the streets to abuse between a man and his female partner.

I'm not a huge fan of Nadine Gordimer's writing, but her novel The House Gun seems to have at least a little in common with the Pistorius case, and certainly delves into the theme of violence in South Africa:

Privileged whites in post-apartheid South Africa, Harald and Claudia Lindgard have managed to live the better part of 50 years without ever confronting the deepest shadows in their culture... When their architect-son, Duncan, is arrested for murder, both know that the charge is preposterous. But Duncan himself fails to deny his guilt, and his parents are brought by a harsh and ungainly process to accept the possibility that he has committed an unthinkable crime. Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun is a gravely sustained exploration of their long-delayed but necessary descent into an intimate acquaintance with the culture of violence that surrounds them.