Spies among the liberators

Part political thriller, part historical reckoning, the controversial book probes espionage claims that complicate the heroic narratives of Southern Africa's liberation struggle

- Reginald Ntomba

Kenneth Kaunda. Mainza Chona. Solomon Kalulu. Aaron Milner. Ndabaningi Sithole. Leopold Takawira. Joshua Nkomo. James Chikerema. Can these heroes of Southern Africa's liberation be mentioned in the same breath as espionage?

The history of liberation is still being written and this account is but one of many narratives emerging from the shadows.

In the 1970s, there was a book Zambian authorities banned because of its controversial content. Now more than 50 years later, the book has been republished, prompting renewed debate around claims and perspectives that many outside the political establishment of then may never have encountered.

Roy Christie's book For the President's Eyes Only has the pace and tension of an award-winning political thriller. Yet this is no work of fiction, well at least not entirely.

A South African journalist now retired in England, Christie reconstructs an extraordinary episode from the height of the Southern African liberation struggle, exposing how intelligence games, deception and political urgency intersected at a formative moment in the region's history.

At the centre of the book is John Henry Poremba Brumer, a Polish-born survivor of Nazi Europe whose unlikely journey takes him to Southern Africa in the early 1950s.