JACQUES PAUW, Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid's Assassins

346 pages.In very good condition.

Investigative journalist Jacques Pauw's history of the people behind the disappearances and assassinations of anti-apartheid activists.

 In his book Into the Heart of Darkness – Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins, investigative journalist and author Jacques Pauw relays how Apartheid death squads each had their own special way of making bodies disappear. “Coetzee burnt the bodies to ashes on a fire of wood and tyres,” Pauw writes in his book.

But it is the manner in which this was done that made parents whose activist children were murdered, shake from haunting sobs at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. “They braaied my son while they drank and laughed,” one tortured mother told the amnesty-granting restorative justice system, which was set up to deal with Apartheid crimes.Pauw describes how ANC operative Vuyani Mavuso met his end at the hands of Coetzee and his team of assassins. First Coetzee tried to poison Muvaso, but when that didn’t work, the man was tortured for hours. “Mavuso must have known by then that he was going to die at the hands of his captors. Yet he never spoke or pleaded for mercy,” Pauw writes.On the banks of the Komati River, near the Mozambique border, ‘knock-out drops’ were administered to Mavuso and it was only then that he fell unconscious. A policeman stood on the operative's neck and then pulled the trigger of a Makorov at close range. The operative was dead.