Author Archives: David Isenberg

Danie Vermaak was seventy-one years old and had not worn a suit voluntarily in a decade. He wore one now, badly, the way a man wears a uniform he’s proud of but no longer fits into. He had founded Sable Dynamics in Pretoria in the dying light of apartheid, staffed it with men who’d fought a bush war nobody in this room had bothered to understand, and used it to turn the tide of two African civil wars in under eighteen months each. He had been called a mercenary, a war criminal, a stabilizing force, and a cautionary tale, sometimes by the same journalist in the same article. He had outlived most of his detractors and all of his imitators, and he had been invited here, he suspected, because the organizers wanted a photograph of the industry’s founding father shaking hands with its current billionaires. Continue reading →