By BRUCE DENNILL, ROB HOFMEYR & NIGEL WILLIS
Last Of The Giants: The True Story Of Guns N’ Roses by Mick Wall
Slade House by David Mitchell
The Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fannon
Whitey: The Rise and Rule of the Shoprite King by Niel Joubert
Music journalist Mick Wall is, given his wide experience as a writer with first-hand access to some of the last few decades’ biggest rock stars, one of the handful of authors to be regularly considered when it comes to choosing music biographies. This thorough revisiting – Wall also wrote a book about GNR in 1991, as well as a biography of Axl Rose in 2007 – of the Guns N’ Roses story is an illuminating look at the career to date of a collective who have maintained a focused presence in the collective psyche, despite having a relatively small discography and only being together in their “classic” line-up – singer Rose, guitarists Slash and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Steven Adler – for a few short years. Exploring the reasons for this reverence – and the patience shown to the band, and Rose in particular, during times when their reliability was sketchy at best is perhaps the biggest takeaway from Last Of The Giants. In the broadest possible strokes (Wall goes into fascinating, intricate detail), GNR are an outfit who lived the drugs, sex and rock n’ roll cliché to its outer limits, and whose lives and relationships were permanently affected as a result. Their enduring popularity is built on a limited number of bar-setting tunes and a fizzing, unpredictable live energy that passed its peak three decades ago. But the peaks they scaled then make it reasonable to ignore or put up with the relatively average (and occasionally bad) output around that. And while Rose’s bizarre diva behaviour has always been a stumbling block in the band’s ability to reach and stay at the top, some of the context provided by Wall in these pages makes it seem more understandable, if not condonable. The “Last of…” part of the title is correct in that it is extremely unlikely – in a streaming-focused music age – that such a combination of raw talent and balls-out notoriety will ever make the headlines in the same way again. This is a must-have for fans and a fantastic read for general music lovers. – BD
There have been strange magical worlds beyond seemingly innocuous doors since storytelling began, but when an author with a rich imagination – and David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, Bone Clocks) has an excellent record in that regard – chooses to place that mechanism at the centre of his story, it remains a wonderful device for taking readers into a place where literally anything can happen. At the centre of Mitchell’s alternate universe is a dark heart – a pair of characters whose intent is reliably dubious, even as it takes a while to be fully revealed. The story is structured as a number of shorter threads that overlap and interweave, but the author’s skill means you won’t initially see how or why. Slade House’s relative brevity, at just over 200 pages, means that the action is packed into a compact space, giving it the feel of a short, well-made literary mini-series – horror in the satisfying old-fashioned sense, rather than the predictable, glossy Hollywood style. – BD
The Wretched Of The Earth is one title in a Kwela series called ‘Pocket Revolutionaries’. It is a new edition of a book originally published in French in 1961, with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. The translation is by Richard Philcox, who has a distinguished career in the field of rendering political writers in French into an English that reflects the passion and style of the originals. Fanon was himself from the French Caribbean, but his work and passion were in Franco-phone Africa, particularly in Algeria, where he observed and experienced the extraordinary viciousness of the colonial government, the suffering of the colonised and the outcomes of the insurrections and ultimate “decolonising”. The book is not a carefully structured study, with neat chapters and divisions. It is torrential, an outpouring of anger and pleading, “speech acts in the moving body of a dramatic narrative”. Much of the context within which he wrote has changed: urbanisation is now altering the political landscape of Africa; the establishing of pan-African agencies and a degree of industrialisation. However the reader will find so much which resonates today in not only Africa but also Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Venezuela to name only a scattering of ‘Third World’ countries. Fanon would have been distressed by the flood of migrations from those areas to Europe, but he had foreseen the escalation of tribal conflicts that are in so large a measure the reasons for disorder and poverty. His analysis of the failure of Western-style democratic models that have been imposed by outsiders is penetrating and although the references are dated, the vivid insights are powerful and still bear much truth. Fanon, himself a psychologist, has given a possible understanding of the importance of dance and physical movement in giving vent to anger and frustration. Without going into the detail he writes of the social externalisation of protest rather than the internalisation of the colonists. In one chapter he excoriates the extraordinary views held by eminent academic psychologists in France of the “Negroid psyche”. There is an interesting group of clinical case studies in a “mental hospital”, where he analyses the aftermaths of being both tortured and torturer. The ongoing and growing conflicts between various religious groups or “faiths” are brought into sharp focus. The book is worth commending simply for that chapter. He writes cogently about the struggle between the new bourgeois, modelling itself on the colonisers, and the masses. The Marxist modelling does not mean that he oversimplifies the complex phenomena. It is a useful model, but must be read in the context of the whole book. Whatever advantages colonisation brought in terms of infrastructure, opening up of trade and introductions to Western education, are in his view hopelessly outweighed by the wholesale destruction of local structures of governance, tribal systems, traditional worldviews and above all the dignity of the peoples, as well as the exploitation of natural resources and the alienation of labour. – RH
Born in 1946, Whitey Basson grew up on a farm in Porterville in the Western Cape as a typical Afrikaans ‘boytjie’. His life took an unusual turn when his father decided he should attend the prestigious English-speaking, Rondebosch Boys’ High School so that he could learn the ways of ‘the English,’ who were then dominant in business in South Africa. ‘Whitey’ is a nickname he acquired because of his light blond hair as boy. A household name in South Africa, Basson is one of the richest men in South Africa but has lived largely beneath the radar of personal publicity. Happily married to Annalise Spies, his wife of more than 50 years, whom he met while he was an articled clerk, he has lived a life of domestic cosiness and contentment, his personal life being free from scandal. Apart from his enforced ‘Anglicisation’, Whitey’s background was that a typical, middle-class Afrikaner. Remarkably, Whitey built his fortune as a result of his shrewd sense of what ordinary, working class South Africans wanted to buy and making that available to them at prices they could afford. The accomplished financial journalist and commentator, Niel Joubert, has served the public well in Whitey: The Rise and Rule of the Shoprite King, not only by focusing some light on the life of this remarkable man but also by telling us ‘how it was done’. After matriculating in 1963, Whitey, always obviously very bright, was admitted to medical school at the University of Cape Town. At the urging of his mother, shortly before the academic year began, he decided to study commerce and accounting at the University of Stellenbosch. She believed he did not have the personality to be a doctor. Having graduated, he went on to obtain his CA (SA) in 1970, while working at ER Syfret & Co, which later merged into Ernst & Young. He practised as a chartered accountant, until a critical turning point occurred in 1971. He was approached by Renier Van Rooyen become the financial director of the retail clothing chain that van Rooyen had founded, called Pep Stores Limited. Van Rooyen was married to a cousin of Christo Wiese, Basson’s lifelong friend since his university days. Whitey agreed to join the company as financial director and, in 1974, became head of operations. In the same year he was appointed to the board, remaining a member until 2004. In 1978, when the Half Price Group was in financial difficulties, Pep acquired it as its first major acquisition. By 1981, Pep had grown to 500 stores, 10 factories, 12 000 employees and a turnover of close to R300 million. At this point Christo Wiese bought out van Rooyen’s holdings in Pepkor and became the major shareholder. Shoprite has become the 35th largest retailer in the world. In 1997, in one of the most famous business deals in the history of South Africa, Shoprite, under Basson’s leadership, took over the bankrupt OK Bazaars by buying it from South African Breweries for one rand. Contrary to all expectations, he returned it to profitability within one year. During 2001, Basson repositioned the Checker’s brand to compete closely Pick n Pay. This repositioning resulted in the Shoprite Checkers Group growing to almost 30% of market share of the South African formal retail food market. Basson had long dreamt of expanding Shoprite across the African continent and did so, from 1995. Under Basson’s leadership, as from 2010 Shoprite had become the largest single South African grocery retailer, having 34% market share. In 2019 Shoprite had revenue of R150 billion, market capitalisation of R114 billion, more than 2 300 stores and 140 000 employees, spread across 15 African countries. Bason worked hard, putting in long hours. Unusually, he had an excellent ‘feel’ for both accounting and marketing. His attention to detail was superb. He was decisive and confident, a dedicated believer in entrepreneurship, at ease with risk. He is an engaging and convivial person, with an excellent sense of humour. Basson retired as the Managing Director and Chief Executive of Shoprite Holdings Ltd on 31 December 2016 and now lives on the family farm. As an account of the history of retailing in South Africa, over the past fifty years, Whitey: The Rise and Rule of the Shoprite King is indispensable. – NW