Sheree Rayfield

The Pretorian Underground Sheree Rayfield

This was subterranean Pretoria in the late nineteen seventies. A lost other-world populated by scores of characters stranger than fiction with names like Blouwildebeest. An underground of alternative lifestyles where equestrian elites rubbed shoulders with lowlifes, where the ruthless businesswoman co-existed with the lumpenprole and the bohemian with the bureaucrat. Three glimpses across space and time into this now mythical realm: The saga of Fat Lynn & Lynn Blouwildebeest who facilitated the selling of a beast and trespassed in a college dormitory; The tale of Elvis of Athos, her allies and her adversaries and the denizens of the deep; The story of Skinner Street, the illicit retail trade and a police raid, and the poetry of defiance and resignation. Narratives of passion, perversion and prostitution in the bosom of the Apartheid beast. A parade of grotesqueries under the noses of the censors while they banned and cut and barred books and films and songs to preserve the people's purity.