| Title | : | The Poisoners: On South Africa's Toxic Past |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1415210721 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781415210734 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 212 |
| Publication | : | Published September 1, 2021 |
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.
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The Poisoners: On South Africa's Toxic Past Reviews
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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.
