Gripping tale of crime, punishmebt and redemption.

Nelson Mandela’s magical early years of presidency, the small towns like farming dorp called Koppies to Chronicle the dismantling of white rule, however apartheid was going to take longer to die in South Africa’s small towns than in big cities.

For the first year of new South Africa a fledgling  black middle class moved in from the satellite township into town with the election of the first black mayor, with the reform slowed and the can-do spirit curdied.

Although there was progress the two communities remained divided by economics, history and race.

BBC’s veteran African correspondent, Andrew Harding’s book explains two dead man, forty suspects the trail that broke a small South African town. “Look what the fucking dogs did to them, someone muttered. No-one mentioned the rope, or the monkey-wrench, or the gun, or the knife, or the stick, or the whip, or the blood stained boots. In fact no-one said much at all. It seemed simpler that way. There was no sense in pointing fingers”.

Set in a town pf Parys, 25 miles north-west of Kopples, build as the dust jacket as ” the trial that broke a South African town”. It is the story of a community riven by a horrific crime, it is one the  finest, starkest,  and most minutely observed  accounts of race relations in post-apartheid South Africa to date.

At dusk, on a warm evening in 2016, a group of forty men gathered in the corner of a dusty field on a farm outside Parys, a pretty platteland town where the politics are as parched as the surrounding terrain, in the Free State.  A crowd of white farmers had cornered two black men after being alerted that an elderly nearby farmer had been attacked. Many in the crowd subjected the two men to a brutal assault and and that two victims died in hospital within 24 hours.  It is an immediate aftermath of this hideous saga.  Andrew Harding’s narrative of the torture and the flawed investigation and trial whihv only reached its close in May this year.  Harding introduces the various characters  of defence lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates, police, activists and farmers.  They are confronting the dilemmas shared by people everywhere, only in South Africa they take place against a backdrop of poisoned history.  Some were in fury. Others treated the whole thing as a joke- a game. The events of the next two hours would come to haunt them all. They would rip families apart, prompt suicide attempts, breakdowns, divorce, bankruptcy, threats of violent revenge and acts of unforgivable treachery. These Are Not Gentle People is the story of that night and of what happened next. It’s a courtroom drama, a profound exploration of collective guilt and individual justice, and a fast paced literary thriller.

The book is mesmerising examination of a small town trying to cope with a trauma that threatens to tear it in two, as such, it is as much a journey into the heart of modern South Africa as it is a gripping tale of crime, punishment and redemption.

When a whole community is on trial who pays the price?

These Are Not Gentle People by Andrew Harding, MacLehose Press £16.99, 288 pages.