FAMILIARITY IS THE KINGDOM OF THE LOST, edited with an afterword by Barney Simon

198pp., paperback, New Edition, Johannesburg, (1969) 2007

"... Familiarity enacts ‘a literary con’ (as one reviewer put it) in multiple senses. It is firstly the picaresque account of Boetie’s life as thief, confidence trickster and convict: a rollicking and often very funny narrative of its one-legged subject’s adventures as scam artist in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. The narrator takes the reader through an encyclopaedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles and hoaxes, often pandering to the prejudices of white South Africans in order to dupe them, or else matching the absurdities of apartheid bureaucracy with the narrator’s own surreal gambits ... the entire book might best be described as an elaborately-rigged confidence trick, a meta-textual con at the expense of the politically correct, well-meaning reader looking for an indictment of social ills." Hedley Twidle, Johannesburg Review of Books

 Dugmore Boetie is the pen name of South African journalist, writer, and musician, Douglas Mahonga Buti (c.1924–66).