The Buster Keaton-like calamities (exploding ostriches, e.g.) take center stage in this Tom Sharpe satire on the South African police, but at least a couple times he tips his hand. On p. 32, for example: "His professional task was to root out enemies of the state and it followed that enemies of the state were there to be rooted out." And p. 242-3: " 'Nothing like the threat of terrorism to keep the electorate on our side,' said the Minister of Justice." An optimistic reader might think that the practices so savagely ridiculed in a 1973 novel about South Africa would be extinct, but that reader would be wrong.
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