Collection: Angela Makholwa

Angela Makholwa Moabelo is a South African author born and raised in the East Rand township of Tembisa. Angela worked as a journalist, reporting mostly on crime in the 1990’s. As a young journalist, Angela was concerned about the scourge of crime in South Africa and focused her energies on covering crime stories in the townships of Johannesburg. In the late 1990’s, South Africa’s East Rand townships were gripped by a wave of violent rapes and killings of young women. A pattern emerged that led police to believe that a serial killer was behind these crimes. Like many crime reporters, Angela followed this story with interest until the killer was finally arrested and convicted of serial homicide.

He was given multiple life sentences and went onto serve his jail term at the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. The man approached Angela to write a book on his life story. After months of visiting the maximum security prison in order to gather research material for the biography, Angela decided to abandon the project due to professional and personal reasons. The serial killer started sending disturbing letters to her postal address, which further exacerbated her decision to terminate the project.

A few years later, she decided to resuscitate the manuscript in the form of a fictional novel, which was published by Pan Macmillan in 2007 under the title ‘Red Ink’. The book was the first South African crime thriller with an African female protagonist.