Little Ice Cream Boy
ABOUT
THE BOOK
From the photograph she keeps beside her bed, Maria Goosen will always remember her son as her ‘little ice cream boy’, smiling from the frame on a beach in Margate with a cone in his hand. Everyone else knows Gideon Goosen as a monster: a gangster, assassin and murderer, who made a pact with the devil and deserves to live out his days in a solitary cell in Pretoria Central. How is it possible that the son of a decorated, God-fearing security policeman could fall so low?
His mother blames it on his friends from the other side of the railway line in Randfontein, others on a leggy prostitute from Nigel who became his obsession. Gideon himself believes everything changed on an autumn morning when the fatal pellets from a pump-action shotgun cut short the life of an anti-apartheid activist in the driveway of his home.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Jacques Pauw’s novel is based on the life of Ferdi Barnard, the gangster and convicted apartheid assassin, currently sentenced to serve three life sentences for the murder of academic David Webster. The story, which is based on real events, follows the life journey of Gideon Goosen, an inmate of Pretoria Central Prison, from the past into the present. Goosen, who had a typical South African working class home in the sixties, later becomes a member of an elite apartheid killing squad.
Little Ice Cream Boy is a shattering, real story that took place in a society governed by apartheid – it exposes the raw brutality of both the police and gangsterism.