Antony Altbeker Livres

Whether it is hijacking or rape, a home robbery or a husband’s explosion of rage, violence is so common that few lives have been left untouched by it. The result is a society deformed by its fears. Closeted behind locked doors and high walls, panic buttons at the ready, members of the middle classes live lives haunted by fear. The poor, who are both more likely to be victimized and less able to secure themselves, are just as traumatized.A Country at War with Itself is a penetrating exploration of South Africa’s crime problem. Getting behind the statistics to offer a sober and sobering account of the scale of the problem and its evolution, it describes how government has sometimes sought to deal with the crisis and sometimes sought to deny its existence. The book ends with some suggestions of what needs to be done to deal with this scourge.

In June 2005, Fred van der Vyver, a young actuary and the son of a wealthy Eastern Cape farming family, was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Inge Lotz, allegedly bludgeoning her to death with a hammer as she lay on a couch in her lounge. The case against Van der Vyver seemed overwhelming. His behaviour at the time of the murder appeared suspicious and incriminating, and a letter, penned by Inge on the morning of her death, suggested that the two had been fighting. But it was forensic evidence that seemed to prove his his fingerprints were found at the scene, one of his shoes was matched to a blood stain on the bathroom floor, and traces of blood were found on an ornamental hammer that had been given to him by the victim's parents. And yet, in one of the most sensational and controversial murder trials in South African legal history, Van der Vyver's lawyers sought to turn the tables on the police, accusing them of fabricating evidence and lying to the judge. In this book prize-winning author Antony Altbeker takes you into the heat of this epic courtroom battle. Altbeker's eye-witness account of the trial presents the reader with all the evidence and testimony of the trial, while also placing it in the context of a society and a justice system that are being stretched to breaking point.