Book review: Death in Pretoria

Death in Pretoria

Peter auf der Heyde

Penguin

Review: Lauren O’Connor-May

Peter auf der Heyde takes a deep dive into the stories of death row political prisoners in this moving book, which shows the dignity-stripping ugliness of apartheid, but also gives back some of that dignity to the executed and their families in the telling.

In the preface, the author writes that the book came about when he was commissioned to compile a list of political prisoners who had been executed. For his research, he interviewed the relatives, friends and attorneys of those who had been condemned.

“The stories never left me. They haunted me,” he writes.

It took Auf der Heyde a long time to finally put pen to paper. For years, he struggled but a feeling of responsibility compelled him to persevere.

Eventually, after many years of meticulous research, red tape and difficulty writing, he produced this book, which touches on many aspects of the executions, including the inhumanity and injustice of the process and what the last few years before their execution were like. 

It includes the testimony of a deputy sheriff who used to prepare the death chamber and led the condemned to their executions. In another chapter, an inmate, who was on death row for three years before narrowly escaping execution due to legislation changes, spoke frankly about what it was like living with the imminent, but indefinite, threat of death and how it had affected those who had not escaped their sentence.

This book is heart-wrenching and so intense that I was only able to read it piecemeal, with long recovery breaks in between. I understand the author’s compulsion to write it because these are the kinds of stories that should not stay hidden.

Auf der Heyde is an award-winning writer and journalist. He is also a senior research associate at the Centre for Sociological Research and Practice at the University of Johannesburg.