User:TheWizardofOss/Conny Braam

Conny Braam

Conny Braam, IJmuiden (The Netherlands) 2022

General Information

Full name: Cornelia Hendrika Helena Braam

Born 28 February 1948

Birthplace Arnhem (The Netherlands)

Country: The Netherlands

Profession: writer

Portal Literature

Conny Braam (Arnhem, 28 February 1948) is a Dutch writer. Since her debut ‘Operation Vula’ (1992) she has published many novels and collections of short stories. In 1971, Braam was one of the founders of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Netherlands (AABN).

The course of life At the end of the 1960s, Braam left her home town of Arnhem to become a writer and illustrator. She ended up in turbulent Amsterdam. As an editorial secretary at the Dutch newspaper Trouw, she experienced the heated discussions between editors and the chief editorial staff about the war in Vietnam.

At the same time, she met South African refugees who had fled apartheid. Together with these exiles, she founded the Anti-Apartheid Movement Netherlands (AABN) in 1971. In a short time, this solidarity movement would grow into one of the largest and most powerful pillars of the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela's liberation movement.

In 1986 ANC leaders asked Braam to participate in Operation Vula ('open the way, open the door' in the African languages Xhosa and Zulu),[1] a highly secretive operation to smuggle underground leaders of the resistance into South Africa. Braam helped with disguises, setting up hideouts in South Africa and smuggling in documents, as well as setting up a secret line of communication with Nelson Mandela in prison. [2] She visited South Africa for the first time in December 1990. Braam regularly gives lectures throughout the Netherlands on her books and - occasionally - on her struggle against apartheid. She also appears with some regularity in book programmes on radio and television.[3]

Literature list

- 1992: Braam made her debut as a writer with Operation Vula: Dutch in the underground resistance against apartheid [4].

- 1993: The Buck Butcher/The Billygoat Slaughterer [5]. The story of an Afrikaner son who cannot break the tormenting ties with his country.

- 1996: Sulphur [6]. In this thriller, a woman working for the Amsterdam homicide squad goes to South Africa in search of the war criminal responsible for her grandfather's death. The novel focuses on themes such as sexual dominance, betrayal and collaboration. For this book she was nominated for the ‘Gouden Strop’ (The Golden Noose, a literature prize in the Netherlands for exciting books).

- 1998: The Amazon of Dahomey [7] contains travel stories, situated in Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Benin.

- 2000: The Anger of Abraham [8] is the first part of a historical trilogy based on Braam's own family history. The novel is set at the end of the 19th century, when Nicolaas Abraham, a Russian refugee, has to watch how a canal is dug right through the area he lives in: the North Sea Canal between the North Sea and the port of Amsterdam. The living and working conditions of the labourers were atrocious and degrading. All Abraham can do is give them a decent burial.

- 2002: The Irresistible Bastard [9] The second part of the trilogy about the Abraham family is set in the First World War, when British armoured cruisers and German submarines engage in merciless battle at sea. The harbour town of IJmuiden, on the North Sea and the entrance to the North Sea Canal, is the battleground of the warring countries. For shipowners, fishmongers and fortune hunters, the war turns out to be a gold mine. When hundreds of deserters and conscientious objectors also seek refuge in IJmuiden, tensions in the fishing village run high.

- 2004: The Scandal [10] also takes place in IJmuiden and neighbouring Velsen. This final part of the Abraham trilogy is a story about unexplained practices of the underground in 1945. The book is based on two affairs that caused a great deal of commotion in the post-war years: the Menten affair and the so-called ‘Velser Affair’. According to many of Braam's spokespersons, those in power before 1940 would have eliminated Dutch communists and other left-wing resistance fighters during the Second World War. After the war, for at least half a century, nobody dared to talk about it, for fear of reprisals. Susan, the main character in ‘The Scandal’, was inspired by the sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, who were in a resistance group with Hannie Schaft from Haarlem and the IJmuiden resident Jan Bonekamp. Every year on 4 May, Braam and others organise a commemoration for the resistance fighter Jan Bonekamp at the cemetery in IJmuiden.

- 2006 - Mandela on the fridge [11]. An account of Braam's personal involvement in the struggle against apartheid.

- 2007 - The Russian carpenter[12]. A satirical story, sometimes with hilarious elements, about a paranoid man in his forties who watches the world from his caravan in his mother's backyard. Loosely based on Braam's own experiences with the former Dutch Internal Security Service (BVD, now AIVD).

- 2009 - The Cocaine Salesman [13] Novel about the experiences of Lucien Hirschland, a salesman at the Dutch Cocaine Factory, his younger sister Swaantje and the English teacher and war invalided Robin Ryder. The story is set before, during and after the First World War and the interwar period.

- 2012 - Sjaco[14] Historical novel about ‘the first real folk hero of the Netherlands’.

- 2014 – The Kruger Beast/ The beast of Kruger/Kruger’s Beast[15] The story of Tess Minnaert who goes on a search in the Kruger Park for poachers, a private detective and an accountant, but above all for a grave. Mpho Langa, a tax investigator with the South African Revenue Service, gets on the trail of an extensive tax fraud together with Tess. They discover that the past is still very much alive in the vast bush of Limpopo. And rhinos are still disappearing…

- 2016 - I am Hendrik Witbooi[16]. Thanks to the hundreds of letters Witbooi wrote to German governors, English magistrates and African leaders, Braam was able to write this book about the leader of the Nama people in present Namibia, Hendrik Witbooi, who, after long resistance, rebels against the German colonial army one last time in 1904. He will go down in history as one of the greatest freedom fighters Africa has ever known.

- 2020 - We are the avengers of all this.[17] In 1942, Jakob Witbooi, grandson of Hendrik, together with many black, brown and white South Africans were made prisoners of war in North Africa and transported to Europe. By the end of 1944, Jakob and his friends would be forced to work for IG Farben in Auschwitz. Despite Winston Churchill’s promise that fighting the Nazis would give the colonised soldiers the right to vote, the end of the war brought apartheid to South Africans.