My Traitor's Heart

A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

Rian Malan

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780802193902
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

An essay collection that offers "a fascinating glimpse of post-apartheid South Africa" from the bestselling author of My Traitor's Heart ( The Sunday Times ). The Lion Sleeps Tonight is Rian Malan's remarkable chronicle of South Africa's halting steps and missteps, taken as blacks and whites try to build a new country. In the title story, Malan investigates the provenance of the world-famous song, recorded by Pete Seeger and REM among many others, which Malan traces back to a Zulu singer named Solomon Linda. He follows the trial of Winnie Mandela; he writes about the last Afrikaner, an old Boer woman who settled on the slopes of Mount Meru; he plunges into President Mbeki's AIDS policies of the 1990s; and finally he tells the story of the Alcock brothers (sons of Neil and Creina whose heartbreaking story was told in My Traitor's Heart ), two white South Africans raised among the Zulu and fluent in their language and customs. The twenty-one essays collected here, combined with Malan's sardonic interstitial commentary, offer a brilliantly observed portrait of contemporary South Africa; "a grimly realistic picture of a nation clinging desperately to hope" ( The Guardian ).

BOOK II

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TALKS OF ORDINARY MURDER

And you must know this law of culture: two civilizations cannot know and understand one another well. You will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus. If you feel like it, you can become an explorer in your own country. You can become Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone. But I doubt that you will have such a desire. Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman, are you?

—RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI, The Emperor

I found myself haunted by an impression I myself would not understand. I kept thinking that the land smelled queer. It was the smell of blood, as though the soil was soaked with blood.

—CARL JUNG, upon arriving in Africa

Exile is a sweet thing to end, even if you come from a troubled country like South Africa, or maybe especially if you come from South Africa. There is something in the air there that the Boer poet Breytenbach called “heartspace and the danger of beauty.” In some way that I can’t really capture, it is a function of all the hatred and horror, all the broken hearts and the blinding hope of a healing, sometime, someday. They say that junkies sometimes put themselves through the cold sweats and sickness of withdrawal just so they can start anew, and experience that wild rush of intoxication to the brain as if for the first time. Coming home was like that.

When I got off the plane during a brief stopover in Johannesburg, the first thing I saw was a gang of blacks pushing luggage around on a trolley. They were just ordinary black workmen, blank and inscrutable, chattering in an incomprehensible tongue, but I was transfigured by the sight of them. I just stood there staring, cursing myself for the tears running down my cheeks. It was so stupid. I was overwhelmed by the most absurd of things—the sound of Afrikaans, the sight of a Boer in a safari suit with a comb in the back of his socks, the face of Jan van Riebeeck on a South African bank note. My eyes blurred at the sight of Table Mountain, at the foot of which the first Malan had settled three centuries earlier. I found myself crying in the fur of two yapping mongrels that accompanied my mother to Cape Town’s D. F. Malan Airport to fetch me, and even over my Boer old man, who sat in his easy chair that first night, explaining in his painfully sincere and Christian fashion that in spite of what the newspapers said, the Great Afrikaner Reform was still on track, and things would turn out well in the end.

For all I knew, he was entirely right. When I looked out the window, all I saw was gray fog and drifting rain. I had come home at the tail end of winter. Cold winds were sweeping in from the South Atlantic, bringing mist and rain and seas that broke heavily over the breakwater outside Cape Town harbor. It looked pretty grim out there, but worse was to come. The rest of the country was burning, wracked by riots and civil strife, but Cape Town somehow remained relatively peaceful. On the fifth day after my return, the weather cleared up. On the seventh, the Reverend Allan Boesak of the United Democratic Front called a inarch on Pollsmoor, the prison where Nelson Mandela was being held. The police blocked the route with armored cars. Some kids threw stones. The police opened fire. People were killed, and the Cape townships exploded.

After the seventh day, every day was bloody. If I stood on the lawn outside my father’s condominium and looked south, I could see smoke in the sky above the killing grounds—the bleak, windswept salt flats where the blacks lived, and where few white men dared go. Next morning, there would be pictures of it on the Cape Times front page—huge, full-color pictures, full of chilling detail: armored cars trundling across the killing grounds like medieval war machines, looming so huge they blotted out half the sky; masked black teenagers hurling petrol bombs; seething throngs of blacks, rivers of them, surging through the streets, unstoppable, uncontrollable, and the sky behind them filled with flames and black smoke. The mood of the white city was shot through with dread and foreboding. When I walked in the streets, I found it hard to look black people in the eye. Maybe it was my imagination, maybe it was just me, but whites seemed constantly to be looking to the sky for flames, smoke, or signs, or searching the horizon for the rampaging mobs for which they had so long been waiting.

I had seen this all before, in 1976, but now I seemed to be seeing it for the first time, and finally understanding it, especially its impact on the white psyche. Whites seemed to draw fearfully into themselves, closing their hearts to Africa, blinding their eyes to the suffering out there on the salt flats. In my Marxist days, I would have said that the force causing these peristaltic convulsions was class struggle, the mundane drama of having, not having, and wanting; but now it seemed a woefully inadequate explanation, much too small and dispassionate to explain the awful fury of white repression. It could not explain . . . this, for instance: this picture from the Cape Times of a shirtless twelve-year-old with his back to the camera, displaying the whip welts on his brown skin. Why did they do that to him? In furtherance of their class interests? Bullshit They did it because he was black, and had to be kept down. They did it because they were scared of him. This was the law and legacy of Dawid Malan. We were keeping them down lest they leap up and slit our white throats.

There were armored cars on the highway as I drove away from Cape Town, taking a route that many whites were too scared to drive after dark for fear of bricks in their windshield. I was driving an ancient Mercedes, a veritable tank, chosen because it was cheap and immune to stones. I was wearing shades, and listening to Art of Noise on the headphones. My boots were Italian, and my leather jacket came from New York. I might have appeared a modern man, and yet some very old things were alive in my heart.

Outside the city, I passed the tall, white gates of Vergelegen, the estate that was once Dawid Malan’s. His old Cape Dutch house was still standing, as was the stable in which he saddled those horses on the night of August 11, 1788. A few miles beyond, the four-lane highway banked into the mountainside and started climbing. This was Dawid Malan’s pass, and that tumble of stones on the hillside marked the site of the cottage where he rendezvoused with Sara. It was all still there, the physical evidence, and the intangible legacy.

I crested the pass and pressed on across the Overberg beyond, following Dawid Malan’s footsteps. I passed the town where he bought provisions, and the river he crossed on a ferry. And then I, too, was drawing away from the Cape, and entering Africa. The countryside grew rugged, and the roadside dust turned red. The very cast of the light seemed to change and grow harsh to the eye. I started seeing Africans, black Africans, walking along the verge of the road, sometimes hitching. I gave a ride to a black woman whose face was daubed with a reddish paste in the old Xhosa fashion. In Dawid Malan’s day, she would have smeared red clay on her face; in 1986, the cosmetic was made from instant coffee. “Nescafé,” she told me.

It was weird. I was traversing landscapes crisscrossed by highways and power lines. The hard-bitten white Boers of yore were now wearing dark glasses and driving Japanese pickups, and their Xhosa foe had become for the most part a downtrodden industrial proletariat, living on concrete under tin, going to work in coats and ties or hard hats. And yet, viewed in a certain way, nothing had really changed since Dawid Malan’s day. On the outskirts of a town called Kirkwood, some fifty miles short of the Great Fish River and fifty miles south of the spot where Dawid Malan lay buried, I ran into an army roadblock. The soldiers were pulling blacks out of their cars and searching them, but they waved me straight through. I was white. As in Dawid Malan’s day, you could tell the enemy by the color of his skin.

I checked into Kirkwood’s only hotel and went for a walk in the twilight. The wind was blowing dust around, the streets were silent save for the scurrying of newspaper scraps and the creak of shop signs in the wind. One of those signs read Salters and rang some sort of bell. Jack Salters was Kirkwood’s lone Just White Man, a British immigrant who married a colored woman. After that, many whites refused to set foot in his general store, claiming it to be permeated by a vuil Hotnotstink—“the foul reek of Hottentot” They turned their backs on Salters in the street and hung up “closed” signs when he tried to enter their shops. Then the town elders withdrew his business license. Now Jack Salters was gone, driven back to England, and the main street deserted save for me and the village idiot, a small mongoloid boy in a grown man’s body.

As we talked, I noticed a mustached white man in a white safari suit watching us from across the street. When I walked on, the safari suit exchanged a few words with the idiot. I rounded a corner, and the safari suit came after me. I circled the block and found the idiot still standing on the same corner, still gaping into the wind. “Who is that man?” I asked him. “That uncle is a police,” said the idiot. It made sense. In the prevailing climate of paranoia, I was a suspect figure. My hair was too long, my clothes were outlandish, and I was driving a car with Jo’burg plates. I decided to play a joke on my tail. I walked on until I saw the blue light of the police station. And then I walked right into the commander’s office, flashing my press credentials, and introduced myself.

The commander was a slight, gray man, spick-and-span in his regulation blues. He had a kindly, rumpled face, indecisive blue eyes, and a golden cocker spaniel at his feet. The wall behind him was lined with plaques for border service, and the name on them rang another bell. Lieutenant John William Fouche. It slowly dawned on me that I was face to face with the notorious Butcher of Langa, the officer who ordered the police to open fire on an unarmed black crowd several months earlier in an incident that became known as the Langa massacre. Nineteen blacks had died, or twenty-three, or twenty-seven, depending on who was counting. In the judicial inquiry that followed, there was evidence that some of Fouche’s men had taunted the crowd—dared the blacks to throw stones—then mowed them down once they did.

Fouche must have recognized the look on my face, because he started telling me he wasn’t really the bad man the press had made him out to be. He spun his chair and drew my attention to a bravery citation on the wall behind him. He won it for rescuing 104 blacks from the flooded Gamtoos River, and now they were saying he was a racist butcher. He insisted it was not true. “I believe in change,” he said. “Ons kannie met n ossewa en perd voortgaan nie [We can’t go on as we are, in ox wagon and on horseback]. Things must change. I don’t mind if a black comes to live next door to me. He must just behave himself.”

Taken aback by Fouche’s pathetic defense of unspoken charges, I asked him for his side of the story. He started talking about something terrible he’d seen in that very township, something that had shattered his nerve. At one point, he said, he and his detachment had been dispatched to rescue one of Langa’s black “collaborators” from a riotous mob. They were too late. By the time they arrived on the scene, the collaborator’s house was burning and his entire family was dead, one son shot by his own father to save him from being burned alive.

In the aftermath, Fouche told me, he saw a man carve a slice off one of the charred bodies and eat it. I shook my head in disbelief, but Fouche gave me his word. I checked it out later, and it was true in all save one respect—it had happened in the explosion of rage that followed the Langa massacre, not before it. Still, I seemed to have returned to a country in which anything could be true—even the most farfetched horror.

“It’s easy to talk if you weren’t there,” Fouche continued. “They wanted to march through the white part of town. My orders were to turn them back, but they wouldn’t listen, so what was I supposed to do? What would you have done?”

The subject clearly pained him, so I changed it. “How’s the security situation?” I asked.

It was quiet these days, he said, quieter than before. A few months earlier, Kirkwood had been the site of an uprising, just one among thousands, barely reported in the press. The blacks burned the township’s hated Bantu Administration office, along with a few buses and the homes of five black policemen. The police subdued them with tear gas and bird shot, and scores of protesters were injured.

A week or two later, an old Boer in an isolated farmhouse woke up to find a horde of Mandela comrades battering his kitchen door with axes. He fired through the door until he ran out of ammunition. Then the blacks broke in, and that was the end of the Boer and his wife. In the months since, all the whites whose farms abutted Kirkwood’s black township had been driven off their land by arson and rustling. Once frontier, still frontier.

On the night before the rebellion started, a handwritten manifesto was nailed to the door of Kirkwood’s Bantu Administration office. This is what it said:

Children of Africa, let us fight for our lives. We have lost our soldiers of Africa and they were killed by white pigs. Hollanders, Sea Dwellers, etc. Shoot us like birds, because we have no weapons. Those suckers of our bloods. I mean white pigs, Boers, white dogs, why does not emancipate our black nation from under this oppression? They must packed their bags and go to Holland their motherland. We are uprising against government. May God bless you. By Comrades Soldiers of Africa.

Soldiers of Africa versus sea dwellers. It remained an equation that Dawid Malan would have recognized instantly. Nothing had been forgotten, and nothing forgiven.

The following morning, I crossed the Great Fish River and pressed on across what was now Transkei, independent tribal homeland of the Xhosa people. Through the window of a speeding car, the Transkei looked like a giant billiard table, the green grass grazed to the nub, grazed flat as a bowling green by too many cattle. This, too, was part of Dawid Malan’s legacy, the inevitable consequence of a policy that confined South Africa’s black majority to only 13 percent of its land.

Here, too, there was political strife. A platoon of rifle-toting black soldiers was standing guard at the gates of the University of the Transkei. The road beyond was lined with black hitchhikers, earnest young men carrying bags and suitcases and cardboard signs stating their destination. I picked one up. He told me that the Transkei Defence Force had just moved onto the campus to quell an uprising against the homeland government.

The student’s name was Mandla, and he was a nice kid, deeply religious and passionately idealistic. As soon as he saw I was sympathetic, he started ranting about the homeland’s “stooge leaders” and his hatred for them. “Those bastards,” he said, “they sell us out like Judas. They sell us out for the money. That’s all they’re interested in—the money that the Boers give them.” He certainly had a point. According to a recently released report, at least R175 million ($85 million) of the Botha government’s “foreign aid” to the tribal states had been diverted into the private bank accounts of its leaders. Even more staggering than the sum embezzled was the Botha government’s reaction to it. In Africa, a government spokesman stated, such corruption was “natural.” Mandla and I had a good laugh about that.

Indeed, the entire apartheid homeland setup was degenerating into a tragicomedy, especially in the Republic of Transkei. The country’s founding prime minister, Kaiser Matanzima, had recently been banished by his brother George, the new head of state. George was an engaging fellow who kept untold millions of purloined rands in his bank accounts and a human skull in his office safe. He was shortly to be ousted by Stella Sigcau, “Africa’s first female head of state,” who would in turn be toppled by a military coup after only twelve weeks in office. Meanwhile, there were rumors of war between the Transkei and neighboring Ciskei, another apartheid banana republic, ruled by the brutal demagogue Lennox Sebe. Sebe was incensed by the Transkei’s decision to grant asylum to his brother Charles, whom he accused of plotting against him.

“I hate these people!” Mandla cried. “I hate them!” It took him hours to vent his hatred of the system in all its many forms. Indeed, he was still ranting when we drew into the town of Elandsfontein, seven hundred miles to the north. I had to cut him off, with apologies, and drop him on the outskirts of town. I had business in Elandsfontein. I was on my way to visit the grave of one Dennis Mosheshwe, and to explore the meaning of his death.

Merle Beetge came from the white suburbs of Jo’burg, from a family that spoke English and supported the United Party, the party of choice among Englishmen who secretly approved of apartheid but couldn’t quite bring themselves to side with the bloody Dutchmen. Merle might not have put it exactly that way herself, but then she wasn’t really one to hold a strong political opinion. As a young woman, she had been much more interested in receiving flowers from her beaux, going out on dates, and weighing marriage proposals, of which she had many. She was very beautiful, a fine-featured, tiny woman with vivid blue eyes and Katharine Hepburn’s sharp cheekbones. In 1967, she accepted a ring from Jurie Beetge, an advertising man who owned his own business in downtown Johannesburg. Her husband had grown up on a farm and yearned to return to one, so he and Merle made their first home out in Elandsfontein.

Elandsfontein isn’t very far from Johannesburg, from civilization, but it is a different world. It is “the plots.” Al...