The Masque Of Africa Part 12

Considering the extent of Avalon, the abundant grief it represented, I thought of what Fatima (and others) had told me: that without apartheid, there was no further cause for South Africa in the world, nothing for its writers to explore, nothing to attract attention, no true motive for loss or tragedy. Was there not some deeper, more universal motif, apart from the obviousness of apartheid? Something that continued pure, and of itself alone? It seemed unlikely. D. H. Lawrence (to take a name at random) could get away from the coal pits of Nottinghams.h.i.+re; but he had the rest of England to contemplate (though he remained a provincial at heart), and then he had the rest of the world. That couldn't be said of South African writers: they remained bound to their wheel of fire.

I asked Fatima whether she thought people might change.

She said, "The present government wants people to move away, but the people don't want to. People sound the same as they did before, and the grievances of apartheid are kept alive so as to fob off responsibility. When you have no better answer you will use that. It supports our film industry: 'Once we were black ...'"

I wanted to know what she felt in Avalon, seeing the blankets on the women, and the mourners dancing on the graves. What I was seeing was new to me, and I thought that for other people as well there must have been something more immediate and personal than thoughts of apartheid.

She said, in her remarkable open way, "It reminds me of my past. It makes me think of my grandmother who wore the white-and-red uniform. It also reminds me that even if you are a Christian you will sacrifice an ox for the ancestors. In some places they sacrifice the ox or cow and wrap the body in the skin for burial. The animal has to scream so that the ancestors hear it, but I cannot do it. I could not even watch my own goat being sacrificed when I did the pilgrimage."

And that idea of the cow being made to bellow in death was so painful that I thought of the way they killed cats in the Ivory Coast, putting them in a sack and then dumping the sack in boiling water. And just as that Ivory Coast way of preparing cats for table made everything else in the country seem unimportant, so that sacrificial way with cattle darkened everything else here.

7.

TO BE BLACK in South Africa was to be an inheritor, or at any rate to have that possibility. To be white and sensitive was to wonder about one's place in the new scheme of things, and almost immediately, when a situation was too difficult, to start dealing in ideas that were perhaps too large for the brutal subject of survival. in South Africa was to be an inheritor, or at any rate to have that possibility. To be white and sensitive was to wonder about one's place in the new scheme of things, and almost immediately, when a situation was too difficult, to start dealing in ideas that were perhaps too large for the brutal subject of survival.

Colin lived with a feeling of fear. He said, "It is extremely difficult to voice anything without looking over your shoulder. There is a complete absence of discourse. I feel I am unable to speak and I am reacting endlessly to a situation without being able to take a step back and thinking about the situation or my reactions. I took another look at humanism in the hope of finding something to clutch at. You can have Africans contributing to humanism, but you cannot have African humanism. But you can't say that. I live with fear and the paralysis it brings. The suffocation is very present. I look back and I think of the 80s, and the struggle to do the right. I persisted in the struggle because I came from a family full of conflicts. Now it is only a memory, but that memory sustains me."

The conflicts in Colin's family came from his divided ancestry. He was half English and half Afrikaner. He had a grandmother who talked a lot about the British concentration camps during the Boer War. He understood the Afrikaner rage about the camps; at the same time, through his father, he had a feeling for British liberalism. When he was twelve Colin was sent to stay with an uncle in a small country town. In those towns segregation was not as severe as in other places, and Colin became friendly with a black boy, Franz, of his own age. This friends.h.i.+p was very important in Colin's intellectual development. Colin said of it, "I saw Franz and me and our connection as a humanist moment in time." And Colin could talk like that because he was completely serious.

He talked to Franz about the city, and Franz in return showed him Nature, the desert and the forest and gra.s.shoppers. One day Franz was stung by bees. Colin pulled the dead bees out of his hair: the memory was fresh all these years later.

The time came for Colin to go back to his family. He thought that he and Franz should write to each other. But that wasn't possible. Franz, though, had a favour to ask: he wanted Colin to post him a dictionary and an atlas. White schoolchildren were given these things as a matter of course; black children weren't. And it happened that Colin had the money to buy those books for Franz.

For the fear that continued to nag him, and perhaps also for his unfulfilled humanist yearnings, Colin now consoled himself with nature and his work and-unexpectedly-his cat's "very intense personal relations.h.i.+p with me."

I felt, though, that in Africa, where cats and animals generally are given such a hard time, even in a protected place like the Kruger Park, Colin's relations.h.i.+p with his cat might open up a whole new area of pain. Colin himself told this story: "Some time ago there was a major football champions.h.i.+p match in the stadium here. Some time during the match someone threw a black cat in the midst of the rival team. Of course, the cat was killed, and the rival team was up in arms, saying that there was magic and an evil spell put on them. I keep thinking about it, and the only rational answer I have is that the proximity between animals and animism itself allows such brutal behaviour. Also, you have to understand that while all societies have metaphors which dilute the emotion connected with what is unpleasant, or with frustration or anger, here in South Africa the distance between metaphor and reality is very little. During the elections the ANC and its rival call each other c.o.c.kroaches, snakes and dogs. You can get into real trouble very quickly here, using metaphors, and during intense debates where animal metaphors are used, real blood will flow. This is very frightening and depressing for me."

In 1987 Colin went to Paris for the first time. He was "blown away." Some things he could relate to, but there were things he could not understand at all. Still, the experience gave him a new way of looking.

He said, "We will have to go through a very violent post-colonial period to become human. You don't have to go to a university to become an intellectual. There are organic traditions here too. Biko called it buntu buntu, and it is the idea that you are a person because of another person. It gives the wish to aspire. My hope lies in the aspiration, not in the flaws all around us-though the idea of aspiring can bring its own flaws."

He couldn't escape conscription into the South African army. He was sent to Angola and there he had to guard refugee camps. The camps had black women and children, coloured women, and some blonde white women and children-Portuguese families who had been abandoned by their men.

"It was in this camp, while we were wearing the hated uniform, that I realised that men have a moral choice to do what they do. There were men who raped, exploited and did terrible things, and there were also men, like me, who made a small group who tried to make things better for these women, who were ready to do anything to protect their children. I saw moral shades in this army. There was, and is, a moral choice always. But I feel that being white is a debt you can't pay even if you fought in the struggle."

8.

I ASKED ASKED Phillip whether there could be an idea of possibility in the society. I thought it was an important idea both for the society and the individual. Phillip whether there could be an idea of possibility in the society. I thought it was an important idea both for the society and the individual.

He said, "In my view the idea of possibility has to do with humanity. In my own small way I think that our transition from apartheid to democracy through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has provided the sense of humanity to some extent. It may have been flawed in some ways or not enough, but at least we did not have a civil war like Zimbabwe, where they wanted to get rid of the whites. This brings a sense of possibility."

He worked professionally with a mixed group. "I don't feel that because I am not black I don't have possibility here. In a strange way it is and is not a disaster area. Maybe it's like being in denial. Yet in another way I am trying to do what I can do as a South African for my country. I also know that I live with the constant dilemma of: should I go or stay? Sometimes I even wonder if this is a carry-over or part of my Jewish ancestry. My mother's ancestors came in the 1900s to escape the Eastern European pogroms. There was a big Jewish community here pre-1994, and there was a dramatic drop in this community after '94. It was really a dramatic drop. Many left and went abroad. When I feel there is no hope, seeing the crime, corruption and general decay, I feel I am behaving like the white whingers. But I always have this at the back of my head: should I go?"

This freedom to move out was like a privilege. Colin didn't have this privilege.

Phillip said, "When Zuma [the new, 2009 president, a Zulu] came into power and had all this rape and arms-corruption controversy and tribal air all around him there was another exodus. I thought that even though I did not like Zuma I would stay, because maybe it is a good thing. Maybe he will connect us to the populist movement in the country."

Unlike Colin, he saw no philosophical side to his predicament.

"Part of me says it was bound to happen. Maybe I'm making excuses, but the people here have suffered so much as 'inferiors' that this inverted black racism has to happen in order to heal in the long run. I believe it may take another generation to develop a philosophical resolution to our predicament. And that can only happen if our educational system improves. That is a big 'if' here."

It was a universal complaint. Poor African education (no dictionaries for Franz, and no atlases) was part of the apparatus of apartheid; fifteen years later its effects were still being felt right through the society.

Phillip said, "At the moment American consumerism is consuming us-malls, long streets, and cars to drive everywhere. It is very ironic. I have become more reclusive because I don't like what I see in the city. There is a climate of fear, and I have seen what it is to live in a city without fear. When I go to Europe I see what a big city can be-small shops, people walking, a street culture. Not everyone is in a mall and they are not driving everywhere. I still try to walk into town some days, because I cannot live in a car all day, and if I cannot do this then I will have to leave. There is a move to reclaim our city and areas in it where the whites simply moved out. They moved because of fear."

9.

JOSEPH WAS said to be a Zulu traditionalist. I thought I should go to see him, to connect again with some of the earlier religious inquiries I had made elsewhere for this book. I had no idea what to expect. He lived in a low concrete house in what looked like a pacific mixed area. That was ordinary enough, but he had guard dogs in a wire enclosure, like rich people, and there were young men in his back yard (many plastic chairs there) and in the street outside his house. These young men were his followers: Joseph was famous and well-to-do, and the people who were his followers tried to walk as he did and tried to talk as he did. A certain amount of what pa.s.sed for political and cultural thought in the towns.h.i.+ps came from Joseph. He was in his thirties. He knew his reputation. He talked a lot, always provocatively. The upholstered chairs in his sitting room looked a little rumpled; they had been much used that day. A middle-aged woman secretary sat at a computer with her back to the room; she was working out or tabulating Joseph's appointments. He was in demand. said to be a Zulu traditionalist. I thought I should go to see him, to connect again with some of the earlier religious inquiries I had made elsewhere for this book. I had no idea what to expect. He lived in a low concrete house in what looked like a pacific mixed area. That was ordinary enough, but he had guard dogs in a wire enclosure, like rich people, and there were young men in his back yard (many plastic chairs there) and in the street outside his house. These young men were his followers: Joseph was famous and well-to-do, and the people who were his followers tried to walk as he did and tried to talk as he did. A certain amount of what pa.s.sed for political and cultural thought in the towns.h.i.+ps came from Joseph. He was in his thirties. He knew his reputation. He talked a lot, always provocatively. The upholstered chairs in his sitting room looked a little rumpled; they had been much used that day. A middle-aged woman secretary sat at a computer with her back to the room; she was working out or tabulating Joseph's appointments. He was in demand.

He said that whites owned most of the media, and he spoke the well-known fact like one who had earned the right to speak it. He went on to say that foreign media had no regard for local traditions. This was much more the kind of thing he was expected to say; and having got there, he became easier, and his speech flowed. He knew, what foreigners didn't always know, that when you were working in an area you had to ask permission of the local chief, and when it was given you had to make a gift to the chief: a bottle of brandy and 200 rand. And when you had done your work you couldn't just go away. If the chief wanted you to stay for a farewell feast, you had to do it. White and Indian producers didn't understand this, and they created problems. Sometimes as a result the chief fined them, and this fine had to be paid. It was an African tradition, and it covered many mistakes-getting a girl pregnant, stealing someone's goods, getting drunk and abusing an elder. In this way you completely by-pa.s.s the white man's law. It was the African way.

Quite abruptly, then, he broke off and asked me, "Where do you come from?"

I said, "Trinidad."

And he was completely thrown.

I said, "Near Jamaica."

He said, "Bob Marley." And then, reflectively, he said, "The slave trade."

I said, "Yes."

"Has Britain apologised for the slave trade?"

I said, "It was a long time ago, and many nations were involved."

He dropped the conversational mode and began to make a speech, clearly one he had made many times before, that nothing was known of African stories or history or traditions. All African children, on the other hand, knew about Cinderella and pixies and Western soaps and Western history. This made them "confused."

He said, "We have anglicised our children and we feed them selective information which is always lauding the West. Do you know that people here have forgotten their own funeral songs? They bring big ghetto-blasters and play a CD at the grave or wake. If you tell them that Christianity and Islam were part of our colonisation, they get very mad. Even when they go for a white wedding and walk up the aisle, all that is part of our colonisation. The twenty-first-birthday party is not African. We have lost all our traditions and we are doing the wrong thing."

People talked against polygamy. That irritated him. He was a product of polygamy and had no problems with it. In Africa the gender ratio was one man to thirteen women. "It was part of the African wealth. Our wealth was land, women, cattle, crops and children. To be an elder we had to have these, and now all that is gone."

He did the talking; he raised the topics. And very soon he was talking about Christianity and contrasting it with the traditional African beliefs which he said were his own.

He said, "I am a modern man." He meant a modern African man, someone who had shed much colonial baggage; he used certain words in his own way. He said, "I am not a Christian. My mother was a priest and my father was also in the church, but they could not give me an ident.i.ty. Only when I went out and found my ancestors did I get a feeling that I belonged somewhere. The old ways summoned me and I found peace. We have many Christian churches here and they all straddle and suffocate our African ident.i.ty."

It was possible, putting everything together, to understand why he was thought to be a Zulu traditionalist, and why he had such a hold on the young. A poorly educated person from the towns.h.i.+p, knowing no history and having hardly any idea of his place in the world, would be given something to hold on to, and Joseph's special style would make it attractive.

He was fierce about the need to sacrifice cows and goats in the traditional way; the animal rights people had to stay away. "They make a noise only when low- or middle-income people do it. You should see when a big wig does it. He does not hide it, and everyone comes in cars, limos and helicopters to be part of the ritual. When we slaughter a goat we have to stab it in the side many times to get the bad omen to go. Look at my body. It is full of scars. It is not child abuse. A witchdoctor came and cut me with a razor blade and then rubbed and filled the cut with the ashes of a snake. It is our way. And I must, as a traditional man, cut or slaughter a cow in our way. Why do you want the animal to be slaughtered in another way which you think is more humane? First of all, the animal which is to be sacrificed belongs to the ancestor, and so it has to alert the ancestor by crying out loud. I am sick of black people censoring or condemning our culture. They are doing it because they are so diluted. They do not know who they are and what the rituals mean. I question Christianity right down to its roots. Who are they to say that we must do these things in a hygienic way? We will arrive there ourselves. Do we go and film their circ.u.mcisions? Why do they come here and pay poor people to allow them to film their sacred rituals? They, the Christians, created apartheid and they enslaved my people despite the Bible. I practise the old ways. I go to the towns.h.i.+ps to slaughter the animal, and if the ritual is very complicated then I will go to my ancestral village. I have my shrines and I wors.h.i.+p there."

He had a pair of rusting handcuffs on the wall behind him. Rusting, but not very old: I was sure they were there as a conversation piece, a token of the slavery he liked to talk about. He said he had bought the cuffs in a junk-shop. He took them down from the wall and began to play with them, as though he had made them harmless. He asked me, "Are these things older than you?" I examined the question, fearing a trap, but could find none, and then I said I didn't know. It must have been the correct reply, because he gave up the subject and sought to re-affix the cuffs to the wall.

He continued to talk, making a leap from the cuffs to the fast-food chains of Johannesburg. He wondered why they didn't do African fast food. He had exhausted his proper subjects and was now only speaking at random. The fast-food people and everybody else came to Africa only to make money, he said, and as a result Africa was "a quagmire of wars." In the old days there used to be tribal wars, but they burnt themselves out very quickly. Now, when there was no tradition, and people had no idea where they came from, they had very little regard for the tombs of their kings, and things were generally deplorable. The ancient graves of the Zulu kings-buried in a sitting position and wrapped in a cowskin-were neglected.

He said, "I really feel we have paid a great deal for our freedom. Mandela let us down. He let the white people keep their wealth and lifestyle and walk into democracy. Rainbow nation is rubbish. Black people are still called kaffirs, and coloured people are nowhere. They have no heroes and are called 'woolly hair.' They had to endure the pencil test."

It was becoming too random and glib. I felt it was time to go. He followed me into the yard.

He said, "I've always wanted to do this."

I had no idea what he meant; and then he held the car door open for me. His followers-in jeans and tee s.h.i.+rt-were relaxed in the traffic-less street, in a cool mid-afternoon light. They could see us through the open gate; but he was so secure in their affection he could afford to do this clowning with the car door.

10.

ON MY FIRST trip to Soweto (or through Soweto) I had seen the Mandela house, from the front and the side, and then, as the road had climbed, from the top. It had seemed to me impressive. It wasn't small. It was in dark-red brick, with a fence of the same material, and it had an outer rock garden. This garden was an oddity in Soweto, and its purpose was no doubt to give additional privacy and protection to the people of the house. trip to Soweto (or through Soweto) I had seen the Mandela house, from the front and the side, and then, as the road had climbed, from the top. It had seemed to me impressive. It wasn't small. It was in dark-red brick, with a fence of the same material, and it had an outer rock garden. This garden was an oddity in Soweto, and its purpose was no doubt to give additional privacy and protection to the people of the house.

Now an appointment had been made with Winnie Mandela, and on this Monday morning we were able to enter the Mandela yard from the front, through one of the two big gates. There were five or six security men in dark suits.

In the entrance to the house were many artefacts and photographs. They were laid out on the floor, as they might have been laid out on a display table. They partially blocked the doorway to what was furnished like a dining room. The photographs looked personal; they were of the family. The artefacts looked like official gifts. There were a surprising number of Indian pieces among them: modern versions of Indian deities, with faces and bodies much influenced by photographs and the cinema, all done with an artificial bronze-seeming finish. Among the photographs were big ones of Nelson Mandela, some in colour. He didn't live in the house, but one felt that his was the guiding presence; and the house felt bereft of its master.

Just beyond the dining room was a big room with upholstered chairs: the sitting room, clearly. A sliding gla.s.s door was open, and a cool winter wind blew in. The gla.s.s door looked out on to the inside of the rock garden, where some men were weeding and some were using water-hoses. Without this watering the garden would have been dry, like the rest of Johannesburg.

We sat with the man who had arranged the meeting, and this simple act of waiting gave a regal touch to Mrs. Mandela when she appeared, quite modest, soft in body, in a grey trouser suit, with her famous wig and with pearls around her neck and wrists. It was hard not to be affected by her, seeing her close, a woman whom one had seen in countless photographs, and in varying moods, a woman to some extent bypa.s.sed now by the great events that had come to South Africa.

She was still full of political pa.s.sion, still close to the fears she felt in the bad times.

"You have no idea what the name Mandela meant. It meant imprisonment and interrogation. This was a period where people vanished or were killed by the security forces for being members of the ANC. The greatest danger was that the leaders.h.i.+p would perish in prison, and that people would get disheartened and lose faith. So I exposed myself, and did it quite deliberately. I had by then lost all fear. When you undergo every possible humiliation or torture there is nothing left. You lose all fear. One night they just came and threw all my things in a van, and I was banished to a desolate place for nine years."

She used the banishment and the remoteness to recruit people and to send them out of the country for training.

It was in Soweto in 1976 that the revolution became critical. "This is where it began, and I still live here. I cannot dream of leaving my people and going to live in a grand suburb."

She was referring obliquely to the larger-than-life statue of Mandela that had been put up in a rich Johannesburg square. She thought it was a "foolish" statue; and the day I went to see it two white children were playing on the chunky feet.

She said, "You must remember that the Mandela who went in"-went in: went to jail-"was a revolutionary, and the Mandela who came out was preaching peace and compromise. In fact, the statue should have been here in Soweto, where it all began and where he lived. The way to dilute a person is to commercialise him, and they have. The man who went to prison would not have allowed this commercialisation or being a brand name for a Foundation. My grandchildren are deeply hurt by all this commercialisation, and it is an albatross round their necks."

The greater hurt was the "compromised" freedom that had come to South Africa. "I feel that we were short-changed. It was a freedom based on compromises and concessions, and that is what Mandela accepted. Black economic empowerment is a joke. It was a white confidence measure made up by local white capitalists. They took malleable blacks and made them partners. But those who had struggled and had given blood were left with nothing. They are still in shacks: no electricity, no sanitation, and no chance of an education."

When she spoke Mandela's name she didn't use the first name, Nelson; and she had two distinct ways of enunciating the name Mandela. Mandela the revolutionary was p.r.o.nounced in one way; the later Mandela was p.r.o.nounced in another way.

She said, "I felt very bad when he went to get the n.o.bel Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Why did he go with the oppressor in tow? De Klerk had done nothing to release Mandela. Time dictated that it was necessary to release him, and there was always the promise of great violence to come if things had carried on as before."

We talked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This was meant to heal the racial divisions in the country, but Winnie Mandela (and others) were scornful. She thought it was especially hard for black people, who had suffered so much, to appear before that Commission and condemn themselves for resisting.

She said, "It should be an individual process and not forced on a society. I think it is a terrible insult to women and men who sacrificed their lives for removing apartheid. They had to go and account for their actions. Not many people know what it was like living under that regime day in and day out. What they forget is that for over four decades black people had lived as non-people. The abnormality of racism had become a normal reality for them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not a realistic idea. It opened up wounds that could not heal. You learned about atrocities and the method and means of your loved one's death. How and where they were killed. What was done to them and their bodies. How can you forgive or forget something like that? Bishop Tutu came up with this fairytale-like concept. When Tutu came to see me I said I was not going to say sorry so that everyone should feel good, and in my case I was not the least bit sorry for what I did. I told him that he and the other Commissioners were only sitting there in my living room because of people like me. It was our struggle, what we had done and had been ready to do, that gave us this freedom. Tutu turned all this into some sort of religious confession, and he should know that people who come to church and confess readily go out and do exactly the same. So much for confession, but then peace throws up heroes like Tutu."

It occurred to me then, thinking of her long life and all that she had lived through, to ask how much had survived in her of her tribal Xhosa culture.

I was astonished by her reply, and her pa.s.sion.

She said, "I am defined by my culture and I know that I am from Xhosa land. I know that I am an African, and we know what to do from our grandmothers. The advent of European culture has affected our people, but our men still go to initiation schools. In my case it is a personal choice, and I will give you an example. If something is not going well for my children or grandchildren, I will go home to the graves of my ancestors and ask them for their help. We believe that the ancestor works with G.o.d."

When she was a girl she thought she would have liked to be a doctor. But she didn't know what it meant, and the ambition fell away. "Now you have affluent blacks who send their children to posh white schools. They want their children to have the kind of education they dreamt about, and why not?"

So she was content?

"When I see my grandchildren I feel like a billionaire. There is nothing like it. But then when I am alone in my bedroom I think about being in death row and the long solitary confinement they put you in to break your spirit. The brain recalls everything."

NOT FAR from this house of Winnie Mandela's there was a monument or memorial which I had been told I should see. It was the memorial to Hector Pieterson, a twelve-year-old schoolboy who, with nineteen others, had been shot dead in June 1976 during a protest in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in towns.h.i.+p schools. This would have been part of the great 1976 uprising in Soweto, the tide-turner Winnie Mandela had talked about. from this house of Winnie Mandela's there was a monument or memorial which I had been told I should see. It was the memorial to Hector Pieterson, a twelve-year-old schoolboy who, with nineteen others, had been shot dead in June 1976 during a protest in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in towns.h.i.+p schools. This would have been part of the great 1976 uprising in Soweto, the tide-turner Winnie Mandela had talked about.

At the back of the memorial was a stall selling animal skins. I was sorry to see it. I thought this trade had been outlawed in South Africa; the zebra skin seemed very white, as though it had been washed in bleach or some fierce detergent.

The memorial itself was an affair of dry-walling and water slipping into a pool: the standard metaphors of this kind of memorial. It would have meant nothing without the blown-up newspaper photograph of the death of Hector Pieterson: the dead or dying boy being carried in the arms of a young man, his distraught sister walking beside them. As it happened, she was there that morning, talking to a group of overseas visitors; and when she was done with them she came to us, a woman in middle life, thirty-three years older than in the photograph, ready to re-live the incidents of that day.

Even with the animal skins in the background it was intensely moving; and yet the memorial seemed a pa.s.sing thing, wasteful of s.p.a.ce; the photograph, its centre piece, seemed destined to fade; and I wondered how much longer this memorial to real pain would last. It was only seven years old, and had already been vandalised more than once by local children, to whom its architectural metaphors meant nothing. Elsewhere in Soweto, outside a cafe, the newspaper photograph had been rendered quite effectively in sculpture, without comment; that seemed more likely to last.

11.

IN S SOUTH A AFRICA, with its many groups, its many pa.s.sions, its abiding tensions, the visitor, seeking a necessary point of rest, moves from group to group, saying, rather like a Zen student: "Not this, not this." It is the method in small of Rian Malan's great book, My Traitor's Heart; My Traitor's Heart; but the division in his heart-an Afrikaner for nine generations-is the basic and b.l.o.o.d.y division between black and white. The book begins with a brief and incomplete account of an eighteenth-century ancestor who, in defiance of law and custom, runs away with a slave woman. When this ancestor reappears he has no slave woman beside him; more than that, he has become a complete white leader. The writer can give no reason; the records give none; there is no story of the life of the ancestor with his slave lover. The whole thing is a mystery; and but the division in his heart-an Afrikaner for nine generations-is the basic and b.l.o.o.d.y division between black and white. The book begins with a brief and incomplete account of an eighteenth-century ancestor who, in defiance of law and custom, runs away with a slave woman. When this ancestor reappears he has no slave woman beside him; more than that, he has become a complete white leader. The writer can give no reason; the records give none; there is no story of the life of the ancestor with his slave lover. The whole thing is a mystery; and My Traitor's Heart My Traitor's Heart suggests, but only suggests, that the writer's waverings have this quality of old mystery. suggests, but only suggests, that the writer's waverings have this quality of old mystery.

This unusual back-and-forth method, of autobiography and reportage, works because Rian Malan is a master of landscape and a master of narrative, with a gift of living language that bubbles up from a full heart and an active mind. But a book is a book; it has narrative needs. The back-and-forth method will not take a book through to the end; it needs some kind of resolution. The reader has to be sent away with a feeling of purpose, of something achieved. Rian Malan is enough of a writer to understand this. The bulk of the book took two years to write; but the last few pages took six months. Language wouldn't have been a problem; the writer's worry would have been the resolution of the material he has laid out, as big a problem in his book as in real life.

When we talked about things he said, "This is a history of victims. There are no real heroes aside from Mandela, who suffered n.o.bly. There is no one who will spell it out. Apartheid is over, and you have the abyss before you, and the only thing that will get you out is work, work, and work." He was not an admirer of Winnie Mandela's; but I thought this idea of work (which was also Joseph Conrad's) would have coincided with hers. (From Heart of Darkness: Heart of Darkness: "Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.") "Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.") Rian Malan said, "I am obsessed with what came after apartheid. One legacy of apartheid is that this is the only country where the economy works and there are solid skysc.r.a.pers on the skyline. The rest of Africa is such a mess. If these African countries want to see how it works they should look at South Africa."

So My Traitor's Heart My Traitor's Heart ends with a parable (the author actually uses the word). It is the story of a white (or English) couple who seek through a life of work and sacrifice in a desolate and heartbreaking landscape to get to the heart of Africa (if it can be put like that). Nothing in Rian Malan is straight, however, and this parable of apparent triumph is actually a story of a tragedy, of two wasted lives; but Rian Malan, while acknowledging that, in his unbending way rises above his story, and suggests that this might be a way ahead for white South Africa: a place where whites have no guarantees. ends with a parable (the author actually uses the word). It is the story of a white (or English) couple who seek through a life of work and sacrifice in a desolate and heartbreaking landscape to get to the heart of Africa (if it can be put like that). Nothing in Rian Malan is straight, however, and this parable of apparent triumph is actually a story of a tragedy, of two wasted lives; but Rian Malan, while acknowledging that, in his unbending way rises above his story, and suggests that this might be a way ahead for white South Africa: a place where whites have no guarantees.

The couple in his parable are Neil and Creina Alc.o.c.k. They move to a piece of church land on the boundary of white South Africa and they begin to practise there the simple, machineless agriculture that might attract Africans. It is a terrible piece of land. It will never-like parts of white farmland-look like central California. It is rocky and arid, and is liable to repeated drought that can wipe out the work of years. The land carries too many people. It is also full of borderland hate: white for black, and all the unreasoning hate-often blazing up into full-scale war-that the Zulu factions have for one another. Still, Neil and Creina work this unpromising land until the church (fighting its own war, and unhappy with Creina for giving birth-control pills to African women) asks them to leave. They have the good fortune to get a piece of land, sixty miles away, from a South African corporation, and they continue their work there.