Pretoria functions as a vital intelligence hub in the novel, but not as a place where the past can simply be retrieved and made whole. Its offices and collections hold records from opposing institutions and political eras; those records are being combined, selectively preserved, and searched for Thobela Mpayipheli. The city’s importance rests on this tension: it is where the state hopes to establish a unified account, and where the absence of a name makes that ambition falter.

A city of contested records

After the elections, the integration of the intelligence services is described as difficult and costly. Competing branches distrust one another, conceal information, and struggle over authority. The project assigned to Johnny Kleintjes was to combine computer records into a central, uniform database. Its scale was formidable: material at Infoplan in Pretoria alone would take years to process, alongside records from Denel, the Security Police, the Secret Service, Military Intelligence, and African National Congress systems in Lusaka and London. The estimated holdings amounted to four or five hundred gigabytes and ranged from information about members of the public to weapons systems, informants, and double agents.

The integration project was not a neutral act of collection. Johnny Kleintjes was meant to erase material judged capable of causing trouble and preserve what was useful. Later testimony from Gerhardus Johannes Groenewald, a former second-in-command on the team, explains that some staff could not abandon habits of secrecy and that operational records disappeared. When Johnny Kleintjes realized that records were being deleted, he began making backups with Groenewald; after a backup tape vanished, he took work home. Pretoria’s archival landscape is therefore shaped as much by removal and concealment as by official preservation.

Paper, microfiche, and the problem of access

The novel sets digital vulnerability against the apparent security of paper. Rahjev Rajkumar warns that electronic information can be copied and distributed through many media and systems, and that connected databases can be penetrated. His solution is a single paper copy: controlled, limited, and filed. A monitored room of typists transcribes digital and magnetic tapes; the resulting pages are analyzed and stored in a temperature- and access-controlled document library, while the digital tapes are deleted. This elaborate procedure seeks to limit leaks, but it also makes access dependent on the institution’s own rules and handling of its records.

Other collections in Pretoria offer alternatives without promising certainty. The files of Umkhonto we Sizwe are held at Voortrekkerhoogte. Radebe describes that filing system as poorly administered, especially after a large influx of recruits following 1976, when there was too much paper and too few administrators. Rajkumar also identifies the former National Intelligence Service’s microfiche library: its index was computerized, but the system remained secure and unconnected, and was still active in Pretoria. Mentz sees value in requesting access, particularly if the request comes from senior enough authorities. The scene presents access not simply as a technical matter but as a question of institutional standing and cooperation.

Searching for Mpayipheli

As the manhunt develops, Pretoria becomes a place where officials test what their records can establish about Thobela Mpayipheli. Rajkumar reports that there is no record of him in the Umkhonto we Sizwe files. When Mentz asks how that can be reconciled with the possibility that he served in Russia and Angola, Rajkumar can only say that the team can examine and analyze what the databases contain. The answer draws a sharp boundary between recorded evidence and the life it is supposed to describe: the database can report its contents, but it cannot explain a missing entry.

The search extends beyond one collection. A team examining files in Pretoria reports that it cannot find Thobela Mpayipheli. That absence carries operational weight because the authorities are trying to identify and locate a fugitive, yet it does not settle what his history was. In the novel, the failure to find him is not proof that he had no past; it exposes how a person can remain outside, or disappear from, the systems assembled to account for him.

A working centre, not a complete picture

Pretoria also appears through a specific intelligence interview. A transcript records V. Pillay’s questioning of Gerhardus Johannes Groenewald on 23 October at 21:18, at 807 Dallas Flats, De Kock Street, Sunnyside. The document brings the city’s abstract archival problem into a concrete setting: an account of the integration team is itself recorded, circulated, and used to make sense of missing operational material.

Across these episodes, Pretoria is less a definitive repository than a contested working centre. Its databases, paper files, microfiche, and interview records give the intelligence services means to classify and pursue people, but each format carries its own vulnerabilities, exclusions, and limits. The search for Thobela Mpayipheli makes that contradiction visible: the state’s power depends on information, while its fractured archives cannot guarantee that what is absent from the record is absent from history.