“By the time you get to the last page of Hennie van Vuuren’s excellent new book, you’ll hopefully understand why South Africans have such little appetite for the past. For, as van Vuuren shows in this passionate and meticulously researched book, ours is an undigested and perhaps indigestible history; that is, we have yet to tuck into the history of endemic corruption and economic crimes at the heart of apartheid and its non-racial successor. But were we to try and take this ugly history in, we would soon discover that it is inedible. This is for the simple reason that its mix of ingredients challenges some of the most comforting stories South Africans have been telling themselves…in Apartheid Guns and Money, van Vuuren and his team of researchers have written a book that, in typical South African fashion, will make for both depressing and hopeful reading: depressing because of the brilliant ways in which the book lays bare the scope and scale of economic crimes at the heart of apartheid (which van Vuuren rightly describes as a criminal economy); hopeful because, as van Vuuren shows so well, the struggle against corruption is indeed a human rights struggle and that, as we know from South Africa’s own history, it can be won. But it must be fought for.”

~ Jacob Dlamini, author of ‘Askari’ and Associate Professor of History at Princeton University