Unearthing the hidden treasure

In all, the exclamation mark occurs 31 times where a full stop would have done. Stylistically, he could also have handled one other thing a little differently. The book has the odd purple passage when the writing gets in the way of storytelling. Offered wine at Matenge's house, Dingake politely declines 'apologising profusely that I do not partake of spirits or any allied substance'.

The book also gets at least one fact wrong. After he left school prematurely, Matenge took a job at Monarch Mine sometime around 1946 but was soon laid off. (It would have helped if the book quoted dates a bit more liberally.) In the book, Matenge asks himself a lot of questions to try to understand his misfortune, wondering whether 'world demand for gold reduced in the face of the Transvaal gold rush'. The fact of the matter is that the Witwatersrand Gold Rush in the Transvaal happened 80 years earlier - in 1866.