Despite the Darkness

It is 1985, South Africa is rapidly becoming ungovernable and a State of Emergency has been declared. Hope for a peaceful end to apartheid can still be found, but it has dwindled to a flickering candle flame in the encroaching darkness…

A knock on the door at midnight; a student on the run from the Special Branch looking for a safe house and transport to the border; a bomb exploding outside the Supreme Court and killing an old man – all come together to confront Cameron Beaumont, a History lecturer under constant surveillance by the security police and subject to regular death threats, with a crisis. How should he respond – torn as he is between his desire to play his part in the struggle against the vicious oppression of apartheid and his need to protect his wife, Jules, and the children he adores? And the death threats turn out to be just the beginning.

Born in Cape Town, brought up in East Africa, David Maughan Brown spent twenty years in a university English Department, teaching African Literature and being harassed by the security police as an opponent of apartheid. He then took on senior roles in university management in South Africa and UK following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990. He now lives in York.