A Memoir · First edition · 2026
What Light Cannot Touch
A memoir written from the rooms where power and memory met. A reckoning with the cost of being seen, and what it takes to carry what cannot be returned.
Synopsis
The official record of a country, and a life, agreed to leave certain things out.
What Light Cannot Touch is the private account — written by the man who sat at the kitchen tables of history. It is the record of years spent as spokesman and personal aide to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, in the margins of the official history, entrusted with what the public account had agreed to omit.
It is also a reckoning: with proximity, with the price of being close enough to see clearly, and with the difference — never small — between power and the story told about it.
Speaking topics from the book
Four conversations the memoir opens.
Memory as a political act
What a country chooses to record, and who is asked to forget.
Proximity to power
Serving a principal whose life had already become a national argument.
The cost of being seen
Public life, private accounting, and what it takes to carry it.
Narrative and the state
How official accounts are assembled — and what falls outside them.
Signed first edition
Limited print run, numbered & signed by the author.
ZAR 430
Direct order, secure checkout.
Worldwide shipping
Dispatched from Johannesburg.
Published by Kuruman House Publishers
First edition · 2026 · Johannesburg
- ISBN (hardback)
- 978-1-0492-8730-0
- ISBN (eBook)
- 978-1-0492-8729-4
- Extent
- 328 pages · Hardback · eBook
- Publication
- May 2026
Colophon
Kuruman House Publishers
This first edition of What Light Cannot Touch was set in Cormorant Garamond with Inter for the apparatus, and printed on acid-free stock. The imprint takes its name and its mark from a house in Kuruman, Northern Cape — a single lit window against open veld — where the book begins.
First edition · 2026 · Johannesburg, South Africa