Word: gangly
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...distance" itself from her. Though less critical, the exiled leadership of the African National Congress (A.N.C.) in Lusaka said Mandela had made mistakes. Murphy Morobe, a U.D.F. spokesman, said the organizations were particularly outraged "by the reign of terror" conducted by the so-called Mandela United Football Club, a gang of street toughs who live at Mandela's house and act as her bodyguards. The catalyst for her tragic fall: Mandela and her "team" are at the center of a police investigation involving three murders...
...Mandela football team and youth groups from Soweto schools have been fighting hit-and-run battles for more than two years, and residents of the neighborhood have accused team members of everything from rape to car theft. In late December the gang abducted four young men from a Methodist Church refuge, took them to Mandela's house and beat them repeatedly. One of the youngsters escaped; the team released two others after 2 1/2 weeks; and the body of the fourth, a 14-year-old named Stompie Mokhetsi, was located last week in a mortuary where it had lain unidentified...
Billy succeeds because he perceives the moral code that motivates the gang. The toughs, Bathgate notes, operate under a "pure inverted premise" of crime as a lifestyle, under which conventional morality still lurks. And although Billy does not accept this philosophy, "it was the premise I had to work...
BECAUSE Billy is not fully a member of the gang, he makes an excellent narrator. He has chosen his side and is privy to information, but he retains enough of his independence to report believably. Readers get more than a taste of depravity--murder, violence and illicit sex are painstakingly described, but thanks to Bathgate, they never grow callous. The readers' initial premise is not inverted...
Billy is by no means omniscient--that would destroy the credibility of the novel--but he is aware and lucky. These attributes give him his place in the gang...