Book launch talk

Here is the transcript of my book launch talk in Hampton Court on 26 May. 

The Emergency Bouzouki Player is a war story.

I started writing this book in January 1979 when I found myself in a place called the shooting range, one week into basic training as an infantryman in the town of Kimberley, in a unit called 11 Kommando, being prepared for a war called the ‘Border war’, which we now know as ‘the war for apartheid’.

The border war as some of you will know was at the time Africa’s longest running conflict, going on for some 23 years and in 1979 it was at its height even though the terrorist leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, Nelson Mandela had been captured and sentenced to life in prison.

My story started with a realisation. I had been press-ganged. Shanghai’d if you like out of my student life as a happy musical 18 year old and placed in a uniform under the life and death auspices of thoroughly unpleasant Afrikaner Army instructors charged with, in their own words ‘breaking down the person to build a soldier’.

I was at that time a soft skinned University student with liberal leanings, and did not take kindly to being ‘broken down’. To compound matters still further, I am a Libran, and as any Libran will understand, possessed with an advanced sense of justice and fairness. The shock of being threatened – on pain of death – with the prospect of becoming a soldier to fight the war in defense of apartheid was iniquitous to me. I literally could not believe that what was happening around me could be either legal or acceptable.

Although my circumstance was a common one in that every South African born white male of my generation had to serve 2 years of National service, I fell into a small minority group for whom reluctant compliance was replaced by obstinate commitment to fight the system, and so my war began. I was drafted into a war, and a war is what followed. Two years of bitter war with the South African Army.

I completed 5 days of basic training before I reached my self-determined tipping point, after which time I became a deceitful refusenik. Integral to my deceit was the claim to be a bouzouki player. This was especially significant in my story because my only hope of salvation from being sent to fight and kill on the border lay in being transferred to the Entertainment corps. A quite amazing unit tasked with providing a top class show band to service Government and senior military functions.

Being possibly the most desirable posting in the Army, many thousands of gifted musicians applied for a place in the Entertainment corps and the competition for selection was tough. When my turn came to fill out my application for the role of guitar player, in the column marked ‘do you play any other instruments’ I wrote Bouzouki, even though I had no skills on that instrument. I made this claim because, as a Greek, I obviously knew a bit about the Bouzouki, and understanding the South African stereotypical way of thinking, I bluffed that being Greek and saying I could play the bouzouki would add up to – aha – now we have a Bouzouki player.

By this slim thread of deceit and coincidence, I became the South African Army’s premier Bouzouki player and by devising a clever rolling plectrum style on my guitar, was able to approximate the sound of a bouzouki with sufficient conviction to fool even the Prime Minister with my smooth sultry bouzouki styling’s.

On one occasion where I was performing my bouzouki music for the Prime Minister, the odious PW Botha, also known as the great crocodile, possibly because he was so very ugly he resembled a crocodile, driven by his close proximity to a moment of sociopathic rage, I told him  that his ‘bum stinks.’

A modest footnote in the annals of revolutionary protest I know, but certainly the only occasion where a teenaged troop in uniform was able to insult a Prime Minister to his face, in the presence of half of his cabinet, and live to tell the tale.

That tale, and many more like it form the fabric of the book. Two years in the life of a Greek teenager at war with the South African army and two years that shaped the destiny of the emerging South Africa.

In my role as a bandsman in the Entertainment corps I traveled the length and breadth of South Africa and the war zone, which, when I look back on it, was a lot like watching surgery take place from the perspective of the scalpel.

A microscopic insight into the festering toxic puss rotting the soul of a diseased nation. South Africa in 1979 was a sick society. Driven by a fanatical fundamentalism, a religious belief system acquired through that cynical sickening confidence trick called blind-faith.      

With their blind-faith, their god and their iniquitous laws of hate empowering a tiny minority to persecute harass and kill at their whim, they, the devoutly Christian Afrikaner ruling elite, armed, trained and turned a generation of 18 year olds with white skins into the killers and persecutors of their black peers, on a scale that I still find quite incredible. Along the way they found time to kill off many of the very best South Africa had to offer, killing off almost an entire generation of future leaders, like the remarkable Neil Aggett, who I met not long before his terrible death after 70 days of torture in John Vorster square, and the equally remarkable Steven Biko.

I always found it a curious aspect of Christian belief that the Afrikaner Police who tortured and killed Biko and Aggett  are Church going Christians who are assured an eternity in heaven, whilst the atheists Biko and Aggett who gave their lives in service to helping those less fortunate are at this very moment serving their time in the burning pits of hell.

But the book is not limited to doom and gloom and self-limiting stupidity. There are many humorous moments along the way with many inspirational occurrences to raise the spirits, and looking back on it through the retrospectometer, it supports a principle that extends far beyond my own story. That bad experience is a far more efficient teacher than good. And so in that sense, it is a book with a happy ending, being a tribute to the resilience of youth and proof that the human capacity for optimism generates its own unstoppable force. 

Order Hard copy HERE  (With postage £22 to anywhere in the world.)

Order e book copy for Kindle HERE

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