How do you trust the veracity of someone who, by her own admission, betrayed the student left in 1980s South Africa and the Security Branch of the South African Police in which she held the rank of lieutenant?
Forsyth claims her book is an attempt to tell the truth about her career as a police spy at Rhodes University and her later defection to the ANC where she outed a number of her police colleagues. These included her handler and former lover at the time of her defection to the ANC, Captain Alfred “Oosie” Oosthuizen.
There is real power and pathos in her description of the conditions in the ANC detention camp at Quatro in Angola, where she was held for many months. Her later escape from virtual house arrest in Luanda to the British Embassy there packs a wallop, too.
And one would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the section describing the death of her third child – an infant of only a few months – and her grief and sense of guilt.
Her tale is readable and her descriptions of the dramatis personae of the left and the apartheid regime interesting and seemingly fair (I have met a number of the former). There are several factual errors: that the Portuguese (not the Dutch) arrived at the Cape in 1652 and that FW de Klerk (and not PW Botha) declared the state of emergency in the mid-1980s.
Also, on page 168 she claims never to have seen an AK-47 before when shown one by ANC trainers, while a mere 30 pages earlier she describes the honour guard at the funeral of the Cradock Four producing and firing AKs.
We all have a story to tell and have a right to tell it.
Forsyth’s story is considerably more interesting than most people’s. She has a right to tell hers.
Agent 407 by Olivia Forsyth is published by Jonathan Ball