BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW: The difficult birth of Lindiwe Hani
An honest look at a troubled life by a woman defined by her surname
It is 24 years since Chris Hani was murdered outside his Boksburg home. His assassination, in a country teetering at the time on the brink of civil war, threatened to tip it over the precipice into a bloodbath. Nelson Mandela’s statesmanlike TV appearance, appealing for calm and mentioning that a white Afrikaans woman had noted the killer’s car registration, saved SA. Clive Derby-Lewis and gunman Janusz Walus were behind bars within a week, leaving in their bloody wake a family so devastated that it has taken nearly a quarter of a century to heal and come together again. That alone might make this book, with its evocative cover of an eight-year-old Lindiwe Hani hugging her beloved father, a must-read. Strangely, I felt almost bored by the chore of consuming yet another biography involving alcohol, cocaine and rehabilitation. But Hani’s courageous determination to meet her father’s killers, chronicled evocatively and at times amusingly, is alluring. She also provides a fascinating pe...
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