The Mask of Freedom, by Peter Wilhelm (used)

​​In The Mask of Freedom one of South Africa's most powerful and original story-tellers unfolds a visionary novel that sweeps across the landscape of a post-revolutionary South Africa devastated by war, starvation and pestilence.

The story begins in a sick Johannesburg, swollen with vast camps of squatters, haunted by doomed masses of Aids victims, referred to as 'shades'.

Most systems have broken down, but oppression persists - the menacing political police and their spies, concentration camps, a machinery for the extermination of the 'shades'

Jason, a potter, scrapes a living selling or bartering the products of his kiln on the edge of the city. A grieving widower, he is moved by compassion toward a damaged stranger he knows is being hunted by the police. This is Greta, a one-time political activist who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Jason's impulse to protect the girl commits the two of them to an adventure in quest of safety and freedom. They are sent into the phantasmagorical realm of Captain Freedom, would-be leader of a new liberation, where, ironically, they are reduced to the condition of prisoner and slave.

The rebellion is the ordeal that tests not only Jason and Greta but also Captain Freedom's slavishly loyal lieutenant Faan who sacrifices everything to the bizarre political vision of his pathetically romantic master. Wilhelm's inspired tale suggests that freedom after all is not attainable through political action but is an inward state some individuals may achieve through love, creative vision and spiritual wholeness.                                           LIONEL ABRAHAMS

Peter Wilhelm was born in Cape Town in 1943. His father was a naval commander, his mother a doctor. He spent his early life on a mission station in the Transkei with his grandparents. Later, in the Transvaal, he trained to be a teacher of English and Science but became a journalist, working first in a printing factory. He has published three novels, three collections of short stories, and two books of poetry. At present he lives in Cape Town and edits Leadership magazine.

Condition: good