Unfolding in 1991 South Africa, at the moment of Nelson Mandela's release, the novel explores the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement - a world seldom revealed to outsiders. It also journeys back in time to find the forgotten history of "coloured" people, whose mixed-race heritage is embedded in four centuries of wrenching South African history. The effect is a bold and revisionary work - a moving exploration of the meanings of history, memory, and truth.
David Dirkse, a guerilla who has "time to think" after the unbanning of the movement, is researching his coloured roots when he finds himself on a hit list. Caught in a web of betrayal and surveillance, David is forced to rethink his role in the struggle for "nonracial democracy," the loyalty of his "comrades," and his own conceptions of freedom.
But this "both is and is not David's story." It is just as much the story of the women who surround him: his wife, Sally, who also trained as a freedom fighter; the unnamed woman narrator, who serves alternatively as a collaborator, scribe, and interrogator; and Dulcie, a leader in the movement who is tortured, and whose presence haunts the text.
It is also the story of the distant ancestors David discovers, among them Abraham le Fleur, who a century earlier who driven by visions to lead a group of dispossessed coloureds on a trek to find their land and their "dignity." The themes of freedom, identity, and power reflect back upon the dilemmas of the present, in a nation newly freed from apartheid, but not from the weight of its painful past.
