Dances with Devils by Jacques Pauw

Dances with Devils (Inscribed Copy of Pauw's Investigative Classic)

A South African Journalist's Field Record of Warlords, Death Squads and Dirty Wars Across Africa

Bibliographic Specifications

• Title: Dances with Devils: A Journalist's Search for Truth
• Author: Jacques Pauw
• Publisher: Zebra Press, an imprint of Struik Publishers, Cape Town
• Publication Date: 2006
• ISBN-13: 9781770073302
• ISBN-10: 1770073302
• Edition Details: First published 2006, reprinted in 2006.
• Binding: Publisher's illustrated card wrappers, perfect bound.
• Physical Format: Large softcover (trade paperback), 393 pages.
• Language: English

Official Condition Report

• The Book: Good (G)
• Exterior / Wraps: Illustrated card wrappers with a striking skull image to the front. The front cover remains intact and glossy, with a small pale mark near the lower right. The spine shows creasing and light wear along the fold, and the cover is slightly bowed. The corners and edges show some rubbing and curl.
• Interior: The text block is solid and intact. The page edges are toned and slightly uneven, with a slight step visible in the text block at the fore-edge. The sampled page is clean and fully legible, with no markings. A handwritten gift inscription appears on the half-title page.
• Provenance: Handwritten gift inscription on the half-title page: "To Dad Thank you Merry Christmas Leon & Andree 25/12/11."
• The Dust Jacket: Not Applicable (As Issued)

Synopsis & Historical Value

Dances with Devils: A Journalist's Search for Truth, published by Zebra Press in 2006, gathers the reporting of Jacques Pauw, one of South Africa's best-known investigative journalists. It looks back over roughly two decades of work, taking the reader from South Africa to Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Mozambique.

Pauw's subjects include warlords, drug traffickers and child soldiers, as well as the men behind apartheid-era covert violence. Among those he confronts are Dirk Coetzee, the former commander of the Vlakplaas hit squad, and Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday Sankoh.

The book is both a record of atrocity and a personal account of what it costs a reporter to pursue the truth in the places where it is most dangerous to find. It is a useful companion to the history of the late apartheid state and of Africa's conflicts in the 1990s.

Author Profile: Jacques Pauw

Jacques Pauw has worked as a journalist since 1984. He was a founder member and assistant editor of Vrye Weekblad, the Afrikaans anti-apartheid newspaper. He won CNN's African Journalist of the Year award in 1999 and 2000, and Italy's Ilaria Alpi award in 2000.

His other books include In the Heart of the Whore (1991), Into the Heart of Darkness (1997), the novel Little Ice-Cream Boy (2009), Rat Roads (2012) and The President's Keepers (2017), a nonfiction account of alleged corruption under President Zuma.

Jacques Pauw Dances with Devils · Jacques Pauw inscribed copy · Vlakplaas death squads book · South African investigative journalism · Dirk Coetzee Vlakplaas · Rwanda genocide reporting · Zebra Press 2006