Wide Boy—the truish story of a Jo’burg spiv

• 'wide boy (dated Brit inflam derog) person who is shrewd, unscrupulous and often dishonest, esp in business. On the streets of Bez Valley Tony grew up hard and he grew up fast. In the cosmopolitan working-class suburbs of Johannesburg, he mixed with, and mixed it with, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, blacks, Afrikaners and occasionally Anglo-Saxons. His first rite of passage is to subdue the ruthless Agnee gang, a bunch of Afrikaans school bullies. Learning tactics from his Uncle Mick, a professional wrestler who wears a large Star of David on his back to incite the anti-Jewish crowds of the East Rand, Tony starts on his life-journey of opportunism, petty crime, street-fighting and questionable business practices, driven always by his never-ending quest “to make money … lots of it.” Subtle, brutal, poignant, outrageous, hilarious … Wide Boy will take the reader directly into the balmy streets of a spring day in 1946 Bez Valley; to the street-brawls of the 1950s’ Hillbrow; to the post-war euphoric boom days of Southern Rhodesia, the ensuing bush war and, finally, to return full-circle to the sometimes murky other world of ‘big business’ in Johannesburg.

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