This April, a book that took me two years to write finally saw the light of day. A Man, A Fire, A Corpse is the story of my father, Captain Amos Maneta (a now-retired detective who was often referred to as the top cop of Soweto). It’s about the trauma of police work and how my father remained human despite the pressures of his job.

When I pitched the book to my publisher, Thabiso Mahlape, the working title was The Good Detective (a contender for, possibly, the most unimaginative book title ever conceived). Along the course of my writing, I settled on A Man, A Fire, A Corpse – a reference to my father’s first day as a police official. But somewhere in between, the title of the book was “…And Then, You Shoot Your Cousin”. It’s a nod to The Roots’ eleventh studio album of the same name but it’s also a reference to Slick Rick’s 1988 shooting of his cousin Mark Plummer.

For the uninitiated: in the late 80s Slick Rick hired Plummer as his bodyguard. Rick let him go after he was pistol whipped and robbed in his home and it turned out his cousin and his friends were responsible for the robbery. A little while later, the rapper bumped into his cousin at a Bronx store and, fearing for his life, fired at him (wounding both Plummer and a bystander).

I found the story, and The Roots’ album, fitting references for the themes I was trying to work through in my book (trauma, family and gun violence). There was an accompanying essay in the book (which I subsequently left out) about the three times I’ve had a gun pointed at me in life (first by my friend in high school, the second by a group of robbers in Johannesburg, and the third by myself). I omitted the essay in question from my final manuscript because I was uncertain how my father would react to it.

Two weeks back, someone asked me if I’d changed anything about the published version of my book. I lied and said I would change nothing.

In truth, there is plenty I would change.

I have a complicated relationship with the book. I’ve always thought some of my writing borders on emotional pornography (revealing too many uncomfortable personal truths and inviting the reader to rubberneck). My father has always been transparent about two crime scenes that he has wrestled for decades to get out of his mind. The first is when he quite literally spent a day looking for a man’s arm. The man had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train and, as a result, his limbs were severed in different directions. The second was when an actress who killed her two year old son proceeded to gouge the boys eyes out with a screwdriver and then burning his corpse with an iron.

When I interviewed my father about both scenes, I spent more time than was necessary asking him about the detail of the scenes, how their discovery made him feel and what it was in particular about these two events that stayed with him for so long. There was nothing journalistic about my probing, though. I was turning my father’s trauma into a piece of theatre (something I acknowledged in a roundabout way toward the end of the book)

No one who investigates murder, rape and violent crime turns the death of others into theatre. That is the job of journalists. It is a particularly inhumane enterprise — one that is akin to looking at a scab on someone’s arm and asking them to pull it back for your benefit.”

A Man, A Fire, A Corpse

In hindsight, I would not have probed as much as I did on those two instances. I also should not have been such an asshole about his religious beliefs. There is a passage toward the end of the book where I try to give violence an actual syntax and grammar. I would not have included that in my book were I to rewrite it.

I wrote a lot of the book during a depressive fugue. I was trying to work out, for myself, the meaning of family, fatherhood and violence. Because of my health issues (and the medication I was on at the time) I could neither sleep nor keep static, but I could still write and hate. And so I wrote and hated and until, in mid-2021, a manuscript cohered.

A recent review of my book said “the love and admiration Rofhiwa Maneta has for his father, ‘the top cop of Soweto’ Capt Amos Maneta, hums through the pages”. But there was nothing loving or caring about some of the methods I used to pry the words out of my father’s mouth. Had I had more time to write the book, I would not have been as unkind.

What my father and I probably needed was therapy. We choose to write a book instead.