THE POISONERS, on South Africa's toxic past, 1973-2020

261pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2021

Imraan Coovadia on 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 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.

Imraan Coovadia is the author of the novels The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves, High Low In-between, The Institute for Taxi Poetry, Tales of the Metric System and A Spy in Time, as well as a collection of essays, Transformations. He is a winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the M-Net Prize, and a South African Literary Award for Non-Fiction. He directs the creative writing programme at the University of Cape Town.