Dearest Steemians, it feels like weeks since we last connected. In my last post, I shared that I'd bought an explosive book the day it hit the stores - and I bought it that quickly because I suspected it might get pulled by the security apparatus.

I had no idea just what a journey the book would take in a week.

The launch

We knew this would be a popular event, so @tim-beck and I decided to get there early. The book launch, which promised insights from the author first, followed by a book-signing in the Exclusive Books store in Hyde Park mall, was to be held Wednesday evening, 8 November.

We have a peculiar system of time-setting for events in South Africa to cater for perennial late arrivals ("oh, the traffic was terrible!" - you know, those people). If an invitation says "6:00 for 6:30" it means you can arrive any time between 6:00 and 6:30, but don't expect them to wait for you after 6:30 - the show, whatever that might be, will start at 6:30. We aimed to get there for 5:30 so we could get a place in the front. There was more traffic than our trusty travel companion Waze foresaw, so we arrived at around 5:45, still early, we thought.

A LOT of people showed up

This was the crowd when we got there. It stretched back to the end of that section of the mall, and similarly took up the floor above, surrounding the atrium.

As I mentioned in the last post, the Streisand Effect was fully engaged. Try to hide, remove or censor something so that people can't access it, and you'll boost its popularity and reach exponentially.

The audience took up two floors and an entire wing of the mall by the time we got there, 45 minutes early. This was the biggest book launch Exclusive Books had ever hosted.

We decided to stand in front - the owner of a mattress store to the right of the stage had kept her store open and put a few couches in the entrance so people could take a load off. It also looked like she had supplied some wine, although we didn't indulge. There was a bit of a subdued party atmosphere, a sense of common purpose, and a tremendous sense of support to this brave author who was giving such dangerous people the middle finger by exposing them and their dirty tricks through the age-old medium of the printed word.

Some interesting participants at the launch

We happened to be standing right behind General Johan Booysen (that's part of his head in the foreground) and Paul O'Sullivan (here's another link if you're curious - that's him standing to the left of General Booysen), two long-running sword-wielding characters in the many-fronted battle between those trying to steal the state and the rest of us in South Africa, and both mentioned in the book.

But forget the old adage of you don't take a knife to a gunfight - sometimes we get the feeling that while swords are admirable, the foes carry biological weapons which we can't see and only realise they've been dispersed into the South African atmosphere once we see the impact after the fact. That's a metaphor, folks, I'm not accusing these guys of hitting South Africa with biological weapons! Just saying that the tools at the disposal of those trying to bring the thieves, thugs and criminals often seem inadequate in comparison with what they are fighting.

Luckily for us, in addition to legal swords and keen investigative skills, our good guys also bring with them dogged determination, fearlessness, integrity, and a love for South Africa, crime-fighting and the promise of the Constitution.

The launch gets going

After a word from the publisher, and another from the Managing Director of Exclusive Books, the main attraction of a one-on-one interview by one of South Africa's premier journalists, Peter Bruce, and Jacques Pauw, began. It was a lively exchange between two seasoned journalists and the crowd lapped it up.

Much of the Q&A dealt with matters written about in the book, but Peter Bruce also asked Jacques Pauw about developments once the book hit the shelves. Not only had the SSA hit Jacques Pauw with a "cease and desist" order, as I mentioned in the previous post - and that expired five days after issue - they then bizarrely threatened the editor of the book. Let that sink in for a sec. The editor of the book, not newspaper. What's he going to do? He just checked that the words were spelled correctly and the prose flowed like a mountain stream, and had zip, zero, zilch to do with the publication. If it wasn't scary it would be hysterical.

Jacques Pauw was hit with a further threat of charges on Thursday (non-specific, as far as I know) and some kind of further two-day cease and desist. He has said he is ready to fight any legal challenge in court. The publisher has decided to publish more in response to the demand for the book. Some are saying it may even reach sales of 100 000, pretty much unheard of in the small South African book market.

The power goes out at the launch

No way, you say!

I kid you not, the power went out just as Jacques Pauw was gearing up to address the question of where the millions of rands put into a non-accountable slush fund set up to feed the shady State Security Agency (SSA) and an even shadier offshoot, the Principal Agent Network (PAN) might be going - in fact, just as he was saying the funds could be finding their way to one of the factions looking to get a certain candidate named as President in the upcoming December ANC elective conference.

It was extraordinary how the audience simple stayed and waited patiently for the organisers' decision on whether to abort or not. There was no great outcry of protest. We were there to support the author, the book stores selling the book, and the publisher. If this was an act of intimidation, well, piffle. In true Joburg style, the gathered throng hung in under a mantle of collective determination to demonstrate to whoever the book had pissed off that a LOT of people would now be reading it.

This happened in one of South Africa's premier malls and somehow, even though the mall has two generators, technicians couldn't get it right and the launch interview had to be aborted.

Time for some good old-fashioned conspiracy theories

Listening to talk radio on the way to an early morning business breakfast not far from the previous night's launch, I could hear that many were thinking the same thing, that the event may have been sabotaged by perhaps one or the other of the more rabid factions, perhaps the one which had threatened "a nice little surprise for the author of #The PresidentsKeepers nice little one (sic)" - check out the backstory on that weird side development here.

Or perhaps Eskom (South Africa's state owned electricity utility and one of the main targets of state capture by the bad guys, as you can read about in @chrisyelland's posts - he's a foremost South African expert on Eskom), as the organisers told the waiting audience that Eskom workers had been working on "something" and something had gone wrong. Sure. The only wrinkle with that hypothesis is that Eskom doesn't serve that area - City Power (Johannesburg's municipal electricity distributor, and Johannesburg is under opposition, not ANC leadership) does.

Perhaps State Security agents? Who knows.

And maybe it really was a technical fault. Goodness knows that's not beyond the realm of possibility. But interruption to the main supply, and two generators not kicking in? The likelihood of unfortunate coincidental technical boo-boo paled in comparison to the siren call of conspiracy that it was outright sabotage to many.

The mall has since indicated it's investigating what happened.

Exclusive Books' managing director, to his credit, refused to be drawn into conspiracy theories, saying in a radio interview he'll wait until the investigation into the power failure has been completed.

Getting the book signed by the author

As lineups go, this one was long and seriously slow. Think about it - hundreds of people, some with five copies of the book, and exactly one person with one signing hand that had to be getting a little tired after about an hour and a half of signing (although the trick of signing big has to help prevent tennis elbow, which I'm sure is not one of Jacques Pauw's biggest concerns at the moment).

While we were waiting, organisers handed out small pieces of paper for us to write our names in BIG letters so Jacques Pauw would be able to inscribe the book properly.

After about an hour and a half, we got closer to the signing. We knew we were getting closer because we were channelled into the shop with velveteen people dividers. It made us feel like we were on a kind of red carpet.

Waiting in line gave us a chance to meet new friends, simply because we started chatting with those around us and found common ground so quickly.

We also bumped into quite a few old friends.

Finally, we got to the bookstore entrance.

Then it was signing time!

Happy us.

What an extraordinary, unforgettable evening.

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