UNDERCOVER WITH MANDELA'S SPIES, the story of the boy who crossed the square

266pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2019

In 1988 17-year-old Bradley Steyn was crossing Strijdom Square in Pretoria when Barend Strydom shot and killed eight black people and seriously wounded 16 more. Later he worked for the apartheid Security Branch, before being recruited by the ANC's Department of Intelligence and Security (DIS) and used to infiltrate the "third force", an alliance between the state's military intelligence and white supremacists determined to push South Africa towards a civil war.

"Bradley Steyn’s book Undercover with Mandela’s Spies is not just a rollicking read full of testosterone-driven skop, skiet and donner, treachery and treason, it is also about a young white man’s gradual attainment of wisdom, of understanding how psychologically, emotionally and spiritually corrosive the idea of unreconstructed whiteness is." Marianne Thamm, Daily Maverick

Bradley Steyn is a former government contractor specialising in risk mitigation and operational support within the US national security and defence arenas. He lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a security consultant in Beverley Hills.
Mark Fine is the author of The Zebra Affaire and Crooked Tales.