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At Fire Hour

At Fire Hour is a sweeping, soulful novel that tells the story of Bhekisizwe Makhatini, a young black South African writer, detained and forced into exile, who undergoes a creative writing masters in the UK and military training with the ANC in Angola and in the Soviet Union, and faces the angst of choosing between his writing and his passionate desire to pit his new military skills against the apartheid regime. But Makhatini faces another challenge – suspicion by his ANC comrades that he was released from detention in return for spying on the ANC, that lingers throughout his exile life and beyond. But, is he a sellout?

The List

April 2020
I tell this story now in the knowledge – sound, I’m sure – that the telling is too late. Too late to go back. Too late to tell it again, differently … I tell this story now because I was there. Because I am safe now – relatively, anyway – and once more in drizzling London, an obscure survivor.

Although conceived and birthed well before the ANC’s December 2017 elective conference and the changes of the guard that ensued, The List imagines a ‘New Dawn’ for South Africa in the closing years of the 2010s. But is it dawn or dusk?
Rumours have abounded since the early days of South African democracy, of a list given to Nelson Mandela by apartheid securocrats of their agents infiltrated into the upper echelons of the ANC during the struggle years.
The List tells the story of a group of veterans of MK, of ANC intelligence and of the post-apartheid intelligence service, who are formed into a secret task team by the newly-elected president to investigate the possibility of such remnants of apartheid security threatening to obstruct the radical changes that he and his team are planning.
The story follows these veterans and their nemeses through the struggle years, exile, the MK camps and into the years of democracy and hope, disillusion and hope again. It observes while the struggle veterans painstakingly attempt to pick through the detritus of the old regime in the new, but just as the moment of optimism begins to blossom, the task team uncovers a ghastly betrayal. Is it too late to save the president and the country?

Songs and Secrets

A decade into its hard-won democracy, South Africa and its ruling party, the ANC, have been through turbulent times: confrontation between Thabo Mbeki and his then deputy Jacob Zuma; the dismissal of Zuma as deputy; Zuma’s defeat of Mbeki in ANC presidential elections; and the recall of Mbeki as South African President, are events that have left many ANC cadres politically and emotionally aghast. Were these events the result of personal enmity? Was the broad church that the ANC had become to unite all forces in the struggle against apartheid beginning to break up? Or did the roots lie in the global dynamic that allowed South Africa its freedom as the Cold War cooled? Written in an anecdotal style, and with a cinematic quality, Songs and Secrets explores these questions through the viewfinder of a former high-ranking member of the ANC’s secret intelligence wing. It follows Gilder into the ANC’s military camps in Angola; to Moscow for spycraft training; to the underground in Botswana; and into leadership positions in the administration of the new government. Gilder’s frank, compelling memoir explores the personal, political, psychological and historical realities that gave birth to the new South Africa, in particular the oft-ignored conditions in which the ANC government tried to turn apartheid around.