There were dead people in the school library. I discovered them in a newly arrived innocuous little book with a plain yellow cover that everyone else had ignored. Clear, merciless black-and-white photographs of people lying dead from bullet wounds. Fantastic! One stunning picture showed a woman lying face down with a small entry wound in her back, then in the next frame, she was turned over to reveal the massive exit wound in her chest. There were many more similar instances—it was absolutely fabulous!
    I knew it was a mistake on the part of the librarian, for if she had known the book secreted such images, it would have been instantly banned. I had never seen a photograph of a person dead from a gunshot wound before and neither had anyone else. In those days censorship ensured that our eyes be spared such horrors—and not just schoolboys either but the adult population as well.
    I took personal responsibility for the book immediately, placing it on an obscure shelf where no one else could find it, moving it each day to avoid suspicious repetitious gatherings, and arranged private showings for friends and foes alike. The ghouls drooled to a man. For a short time I was the most popular and sought-after person in the school. Over six joyous days my reign of glory continued until someone blabbed and the headmaster came personally and removed the book beyond our grasp and astonished eyes—onto his own bookshelf in his office in fact, for I saw it there one day when being reprimanded over some other matter. There were reports too, of how the teachers gathered and ghoul-drooled in the staff room, just as we had.
    But the damage was already done, of course. Moreover, I had even troubled to read the slim volume—the only person who did—so that I could speak to my admirers with authority as I revealed to them its wonders, and some even remembered that they had seen newspaper items regarded the massacre earlier that same year, but, of course, not including those dreadful visages.
    On March 21, 1960, South African police fired needlessly upon a huge crowd of civilian blacks gathered for a peaceful protest outside Sharpeville Police Station, killing 69 and wounding 180. The subsequent hastily-published book, Shooting at Sharpeville, was written by Ambrose Reeves, Bishop of Johannesburg. The slim volume described the massacre in precise detail and then went on to an open condemnation of the police. I never looked at cops quite so trustfully again. It might also have been the only book by a Bishop that I ever read. And, interestingly, page 52 is blank but for a border and a small inscription A sketch-map was to have appeared on this page. This has been impossible at the last minute because the Municipality of Vereeniging has refused to supply a copy. The book was published in London, where the good Bishop had already been deported as a result of his public protestation over the incident. The boat of Apartheid had begun to rock, although it would take three decades before it would finally capsize.