World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

ROBBEN ISLAND, CAPE TOWN PROVINCE, UNITED STATES OF
SOUTHERN AFRICA
[Xolelwa Azania greets me at his writing desk, inviting me to switch places with
him so I can enjoy the cool ocean breeze from his window. He apologizes for the
“mess” and insists on clearing the notes off his desk before we continue. Mister
Azania is halfway through his third volume of Rainbow Fist: South Africa at War.
This volume happens to be about the subject we are discussing, the turning
point against the living dead, the moment when his country pulled itself back
from the brink.]
Dispassionate, a rather mundane word to describe one of history’s most controversial figures.
Some revere him as a savior, some revile him as a monster, but if you ever met Paul Redeker, ever
discussed his views of the world and the problems, or more importantly, the solutions to the
problems that plague the world, probably the one word that would always cling to your impression
of the man is dispassionate.
Paul always believed, well, perhaps not always, but at least in his adult life, that humanity’s one
fundamental flaw was emotion. He used to say that the heart should only exist to pump blood to
the brain, that anything else was a waste of time and energy. His papers from university, all
dealing with alternate “solutions” to historical, societal quandaries, were what first brought him to
the attention of the apartheid government. Many psychobiographers have tried to label him a
racist, but, in his own words, “racism is a regrettable by-product of irrational emotion.” Others
have argued that, in order for a racist to hate one group, he must at least love another. Redeker
believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were “impediments of the human
condition,” and, in his words again, “imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would
only shed its humanity.” Evil? Most would call it that, while others, particularly that small cadre in
the center of Pretoria’s power, believed it to be “an invaluable source of liberated intellect.”
It was the early 1980s, a critical time for the apartheid government. The country was resting on
a bed of nails. You had the ANC, you had the Inkatha Freedom Party, you even had extremist,
right-wing elements of the Afrikaner population that would have liked nothing better than open
revolt in order to bring about a complete racial showdown. On her border, South Africa faced
nothing but hostile nations, and, in the case of Angola, a Soviet-backed, Cuban-spearheaded civil
war. Add to this mixture a growing isolation from the Western democracies (which included a
critical arms embargo) and it was no surprise that a last-ditch fight for survival was never far from
Pretoria’s mind.