The Stone Country (African Writers Series No. 152)

The Stone Country is the story of people in a world without beauty, a lunar barrenness of stone, steel and locked doors. No tree grows here to offer men the peace of cooling shade. Shadow there is and walls rising like cliffs and scribbled on with protests - obscene, profane, belligerent, nostalgic, laced with grim, mocking humour. This is a prison where men are thrown together, regardless of the charges against them. For they are men who share a common crime in South Africa: they are coloured: Solly acting the clown in tattered rags, a scarecrow come to life; Josef the Turk, lean, sleek, dangerous as a knife blade; his sworn enemy, Butcherboy Williams, a collector of tribute; and the Casbah Kid who will hang for murder. Getting him to talk is like trying to pry open the jammed doors of a vault; yet George tries; George whose crime is illegal organizing in the fight against apartheid. This story is theirs, men who know violence and who express it in a prison break, in a fight to the death for power in the cells. It is also the story of a man who brings a touch of humanity into the dark corrosion of terror and brutality.