About the Book Launch
SAFIA is delighted to celebrate the literary achievement of our Trustee, Shabodien Roomanay, on the launch of his first novel, Murder by Order!
Members of SAFIA were proud to attend the book launch on Saturday, 5 September 2026, and to share in this special milestone.
We congratulate Shabodien on this wonderful achievement and wish him every success with his first novel. Masha Allah, and may this be the first of many literary works to come.
Synopsis
Set primarily in Cape Town’s Cape Flats during the 1980s, Murder by Order follows Abdul, a young activist from Crawford who becomes radicalised through his teachers, the firebrand Richard Bodley, and his exposure to the sermons of Imam Abdullah Haron and the philosophy of Achmad Cassiem’s Qibla Movement.
The narrative interweaves Abdul’s journey with the perspective of General JP Van der Merwe, a brutal Afrikaner security policeman trained by Mossad and funded by the CIA, who is seconded to Cape Town to crush the escalating resistance. Through parallel storytelling, the novel exposes the machinery of state terror: assassinations planned at tea tables, the use of witdoekke (vigilantes) as proxies, the Trojan Horse Massacre of 1985, the Gugulethu Seven of 1986, and the systematic torture and murder of detainees.
The novel culminates in Abdul’s arrest, his psychological breaking under solitary confinement, his mother and aunt’s murder in a state-engineered “accident,” and his transformation from activist to a man whose spirit, though caged, has been set free.
