ABSTRACT
One morning in Johannesburg a few years back, I was roused early by the dawn chorus of the telephone. In my penumbral, precaffeinated state I found myself listening to an agitated voice inquiring from the far end: ‘Hello, excuse me, are you the ANC Repatriation Office?’ It took me some little while to awaken to the fact that I was neither in the grip of one of my recurrent bureaucracy nightmares nor being enveloped by yet another variant of the South African dementia. For that week I had moved in to share a house with Mzwai Booi, a guerrilla leader, recently returned from Moscow and Lusaka, who had landed the absolutely mind-bending job of chief orchestrator of the exiles’ return.
