Jason Furman's Reviews > The Poisoners: On South Africa's Toxic Past

A twisted tale of the role of poisoning in African history, especially recent southern African history. It is told with an eye to historical detail but also some literary flair. It begins with disgraced South African President Jacob Zuma's claim that he had been poisoned and then traverses through a range of history (much of it barely written about, not necessarily recorded, and thus by necessity to a certain degree speculative) of people developing poisons for the the Rhodesian and South African intelligence services, earlier mass poisonings as source of control in Madagascar, some parallels between all of this and the poison used in the Holocaust, and then in post-Apartheid South Africa. There is something especially terrifying and horrifying about poison that can strike anywhere at anytime and Imraan Coovadia both seizes on this terror and also describes and analyzes how it was used to either terrify or conceal violence or often both.