Marion Sparg's Guilty and Proud shows up Jacob Zuma's party as interlocutors. Ferial Haffajee asked the author about her memoir.

Marion Sparg's story starts in her Hillbrow apartment in the mid-Eighties. She puts on a sensible suit, slings a bag over her shoulder and heads to the police station where she plants a bomb, the first of several. It is a sweeping memoir of a woman soldier.

Sparg went on to be charged and found guilty of treason, with her race and steadfast commitment to uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) found to be an aggravating factor by the apartheid judge. As the MK party of former president Jacob Zuma shapes a contemporary political narrative, the book (inadvertently) reclaims the mantle of the true MK, showing up the newbies as fong kong interlocutors.

Ferial Haffajee: What a beautiful story. Why was it so difficult to tell? You write that your editors and muses had to keep telling you that you couldn't write yourself out of your own memoir.

Marion Sparg: I had written most of the book a long time ago but as they say, life keeps on getting in the way. After publishing Bulelani's story (Ngcuka's The Sting in the Tale) in 2022, I finally got down to finishing the...