“So, let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand.” — Phil Graham, US newspaperman,1963.
If newspapers are the first rough draft of history the world should be rendered more understandable, and the rough draft corrected for errors and falsifications when books are subsequently written about controversial moments in history.
Alas there are far too many books on South Africa’s contemporary history that do not simply fail to correct the “facts” but deliberately amplify false narratives that had featured in newspapers at those moments. Marion Sparg’s authorised biography of the first national director of public prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka: The sting in the tale, is not one of them.
The book sheds a welcome light on a pivotal moment of South Africa’s democratic history: Bulelani Ngcuka’s decision not to prosecute Jacob Zuma for allegedly taking bribes from the French arms dealer Thales (formerly Thompson CSF) while acknowledging that a prima facie case of corruption existed. He says if he had his time over, given the same circumstances, he would have made the same decision.
Given our present context, the book enables us to employ the exact science of hindsight to contemplate how our shameful political history of the past two decades might have been different.
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