Blood Rose (39 page)

Walvis Bay was of strategic importance to South Africa, and in 1962 a large army base was established – part of it in the town, most of it in the desert – as internal and international resistance to apartheid in South Africa and South West Africa grew. In 1977, it became clear that South Africa would have to give up control of the territory. The South Africans appointed an Administrator General for South West Africa/Namibia (as the territory came to be called). On the same day, however, they annexed Walvis Bay, justifying this on the British annexation on behalf of the Cape Colony a century earlier. As apartheid laws eased in the rest of the country, they were applied ever more strictly in Walvis Bay.

Namibia became independent in March of 1990, but from 1990 to 1994, the South African army consolidated its presence and continued to control the harbour, leaving the town in a strange economic and political limbo until South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, when Walvis Bay and its population of about forty thousand were reintegrated into Namibia.

Taken from Melinda Silverman’s
Between the Atlantic and the Namib: An Environmental History of Walvis Bay
, published by the Namibia Scientific Society (Windhoek, 2004).

Margie Orford, an award-winning journalist and internationally acclaimed writer, is the author of
Like Clockwork
, the debut novel in the Clare Hart series, which has since been translated into more than eight languages.

She was born in London and grew up in Namibia, the setting for
Blood Rose
, her highly acclaimed second novel in the series. Educated in South Africa, she currently lives in Cape Town with her husband and three daughters.

For more information go to her website:
www.margieorford.com

Thanks to Willie Visser and Sharon Roberts, for patiently explaining ballistics to me and for teaching me to shoot straight; to Johan Kok, for detailed information on blood splatter patterns and forensics in out-ofthe-way places; to Leanne Dreyer, for introducing me to the microscopic wonderland of pollens and forensic palynology; to Colleen Mannheimer, who told me which plants grow where in the Namib Desert; to Bruno Nebe, for rescuing me at the last minute with information about the bats that live in the Kuiseb River; to Johann Dempers, for giving me so many rivetingly gory pathology lessons; and to Andrew Brown, for letting me borrow his wonderful
Coldsleep Lullaby
cop, Eberard Februarie. Special thanks to Martha Evans for being such a creative and patient editor, and to my literary agent, Isobel Dixon, my heartfelt thanks. Also, to Michelle Matthews, for having faith again.

Any mistakes and all fabrications are mine.