Shadley Fataar

Shadley Fataar lived under the yoke of apartheid in Cape Town, South Africa.
His politically formative years began with the 1960 police-shooting deaths of 69 Sharpeville anti-pass law protestors. Two of his activist Livingstone High School teachers were imprisoned on the infamous Robben Island, while three others, including his father, Alie Fataar, were banned. Alie escaped into exile along with two colleagues.

His father in exile for 30 years, Shadley’s experience after qualifying in medicine included three years in Ceza Mission Hospital in Kwazulu, a year as a GP locum in a slum township, then eight years as radiologist at Groote Schuur, arguably South Africa’s finest hospital. After working in a Zululand mission hospital Shadley returned to Cape Town, where he witnessed escalating police brutality, starting with the 170 Soweto student deaths in 1976.

These experiences provide such a rich, authentic source of material for his trilogy.

His recently completed trilogy of socio-political thrillers, “In the Shadow of Table Mountain, Cape Town” offers insights to how more deaths resulted from poverty, ill health and crime than repressive police violence and attempted insurrection. His opus concludes with South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.

After South Africa, Shadley lived in Kuwait, New Zealand and Oman (where he reported on local running, scuba-diving and expatriate golf for the Oman Times).

Now a semi-retired radiologist living on the New South Wales mid-north coast, working at the Coffs Harbour Base Hospital, Shadley continues a lifetime commitment to public sector health and teaching hospitals. He has 50 academic papers to his name.

A member of the Coffs Harbour Writers Group since 2006, Shadley now spends more time as writer than doctor.

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Fury and Revenge in Cape Town by Shadley Fataar

Fury and Revenge in Cape Town, covers a two-month period after the 1976 post-Soweto student revolt which leads to the eventual collapse of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Like the rest of the country, Cape Town is in a state of upheaval, especially on the Cape Flats, long regarded as the dumping ground of apartheid. The student-led insurrection is on the boil while Dr Stanley Gershon, a well-intentioned general practitioner, works under stress in the slum environment. Together with his friend Jim Davids, girlfriend Fay Ismail and Detective Adams and his student activist daughter, Lydiah, all are caught up in the overlapping dramas of police brutality, and poverty-related diseases, as well as criminal activity in a slum, the scene of a series of brutal attacks on paedophiles. The twin dramas of political fury and personal revenge enmesh all the characters in the turmoil of insurrection in the shadow of Cape Town’s emblematic Table Mountain.

9 years in the making, but the first of Shadley Fataar’s gripping 3 book series, Fury and Revenge in Cape Town, was finally launched worldwide by D2D Publishing on July 7 2023.

Discover how terrifying it was for a township doctor and his friends to live and work in a city in the throes of the post-Soweto violence of 1976, truly a winter of discontent in the Mother City. Join them as they experience the trauma of police brutality on the Cape Flats, long regarded as apartheid’s dumping ground. It was petrifying, yet life went on, including local township rugby on a makeshift rugby field while a seemingly random series of brutal criminal attacks breaks out in Elsies River township.

Dr Stanley Gershon, his close friends Jim Davids and Fay Ismail, Detective Adams and his activist university student daughter, Lydiah, all struggle with the overlapping dramas of criminal and police ferocity in the township. Who will survive the violence?

It’s all there, and more, between the covers of Fury and Revenge in Cape Town – available in all the usual places, including Apple, Kobo, Nook, Scribd, Thalia, Smashwords, Indigo, Angus & Robertson, Mondadori & Vivlio. 

ISBN: 9780645824605

e-Book: 9780645824612