Going underground honestly,
and returning with a story.
For those who need a pen that has gone underground and returned with something.
Writing is not what I do after the thinking is done. It is how the thinking becomes real.
I have written across registers — the memoir, the research monograph, the political column, the script. What holds them together is not a genre but a method: go beneath the surface of the subject, stay there long enough to find what is actually true, and come back with something that could not have been written from the surface.
How I Took Back My Power — published by Tafelberg, NB Publishers in 2021 — is the most direct expression of that method. It excavates a life: a toxic marriage, psychological abuse endured behind a public professional life, and the long private underground work of healing and reconstitution. It was not written as confession. It was written as philosophical act — the private, honestly rendered, as the most powerful form of the public.
The research writing operates from the same method applied to political life — the question that won't leave you alone, the gap in the public conversation that demands a response. That body of work includes The Democratic Opportunity: Does South Africa Need Electoral Reform (2014) and Electoral Systems and Accountability (2017) — the latter a seven-country study examining the relationship between how nations elect their governments and whether those governments can be held to account. It extends further into commissioned research, chapter contributions, and the documentary Promise Betrayed: South Africa After Two Decades of Democracy, which I scripted and presented. The full range is available at Critical ThinkAR.
Commissioned writing is an act of trust. You are asking someone to go underground on your behalf — or alongside you — and return with something that carries the weight of what was actually found there. That requires a writer who knows what the underground costs, and who has demonstrated a willingness to pay it.
The Subsoil philosophy is not a metaphor I apply to writing. It is the framework inside which all my writing lives. Compaction — the forces that keep the real subject buried. Aeration — the deliberate work of loosening what has been compacted until the true subject can breathe. Subsoil knowing — the intelligence that only becomes available when you go deep enough and stay honest. Every piece of writing I produce moves through that sequence. The result is writing that does not sit on the surface of its subject.
For a fuller sense of the writer behind the work — the books, the practice, the soul of it — visit The Writing.
The writing that matters most is almost always the writing that required the writer to go somewhere uncomfortable and stay there. If that is the kind of writing you need — let's talk.