The Poisoners: On South Africa's Toxic Past

by Imraan Coovadia

The Poisoners is a history of four devastating chapters in the making of the region, seen through the disturbing use of toxins and accusations of poisoning circulated by soldiers, spies, and politicians in Zimbabwe and South Africa.Imraan Coovadia’s fascinating new book exposes the secret use of poisons and diseases in the Rhodesian bush war and independent Zimbabwe, and the apparent connection to the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States; the enquiry into the chemical and biological warfare programme in South Africa known as Project Coast, discovered through the arrest and failed prosecution of Dr Wouter Basson; the use of toxic compounds such as Virodene to treat patients at the height of the Aids epidemic in South Africa, and the insistence of the government that proven therapies like Nevirapine, which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, were in fact poisons; and the history of poisoning and accusations of poisoning in the modern history of the African National Congress, from its guerrilla camps in Angola to Jacob Zuma’s suggestion that his fourth wife collaborated with a foreign intelligence agency to have him murdered.But The Poisoners is not merely a book of history. It is also a meditation, by a most perceptive commentator, on the meaning of race, on the unhappy history of black and white in southern Africa, and on the nature of good and evil.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, South Africa

334 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2021

About the author

Imraan Coovadia was born in Durban in 1970. He is the author of the novels The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves, High Low In-between and The Institute for Taxi Poetry.

He has also published a study of V.S. Naipaul, as well as a collection of essays, Transformations, and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, N+1, The Independent, Threepenny Review, Chimurenga, and The Times of India.

His work has won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the University of Johannes­burg Prize, the M-Net Prize, and a South African Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

He is a graduate of Harvard College and directs the writing programme at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Reviews

[Yoni Bass · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compelling read which comprehensively details allegations of poisonings and actual poisonings in both Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and South Africa. At times I felt the substance of what was written was only tangentially connected to the ideas of poisoning and that understanding other factors, as opposed to fears around poisoning, would be more instructive. This was particularly the case in the chapter on the Mbeki governments handling of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I also found that theory written about was particularly inaccessible and was sometimes hard to connect to the content before and after the theory.

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A twisted tale of the role of poisoning in African history, especially recent southern African history. It is told with an eye to historical detail but also some literary flair. It begins with disgraced South African President Jacob Zuma's claim that he had been poisoned and then traverses through a range of history (much of it barely written about, not necessarily recorded, and thus by necessity to a certain degree speculative) of people developing poisons for the the Rhodesian and South African intelligence services, earlier mass poisonings as source of control in Madagascar, some parallels between all of this and the poison used in the Holocaust, and then in post-Apartheid South Africa. There is something especially terrifying and horrifying about poison that can strike anywhere at anytime and Imraan Coovadia both seizes on this terror and also describes and analyzes how it was used to either terrify or conceal violence or often both.