My Traitor's Heart
Holahan, David
MASTERFUL & DISHEARTENING NY TRAITOR'S HEART Rian Malan The Atlantic Monthly Press, $19.95, 349 pp. David Holahan A uthor Rian Malan is drinking with Mike, a black friend, and sev-eral black...
...Tribal disputes have left much of the best agricultural land in limbo and periodic wars flair between Zulu subtribes...
...One night he has a dream, a vision of his persecutor, who has a head just like a white rock...
...they force whites to examine their lives, and the structure of their society, and when whites do so, they see that they cannot escape complicity...
...David Holahan A uthor Rian Malan is drinking with Mike, a black friend, and sev-eral black strangers early one morning in a Soweto shebeen when the subject of violent revolution comes up...
...Malan's dilemma is that he is in the middle, with no place and no one to turn to...
...Later that night, after more drinks, Malan and Mike have a spat while drinking with Judo, a one-eyed black man with no shoes...
...That quickens the fear into a fever...
...The police are inundated with false alarms...
...South Africa in 1986 is a place where an eye for an eye still reigns supreme and Malan is trying to find out why and how long it will go on this way...
...And yet Neil Alcock's death is not without meaning...
...I was out of my mind with terror, and in that moment, it came to me: This was it-the unseen force that obliterated reason in South Africa...
...All I could hear was the drumming of blood in my ears, and the rasp of my own breathing...
...Milan thought a little terror was about to befall him that early morning he was walking the streets of Soweto: "And then a hand tapped my shoulder...
...Orphaned, abused, and despondent, he tries hanging himself but fails...
...Having recently returned from eight years of self-imposed exile from his South African homeland, Malan's dilemma is manifest: "On the one hand, I was white, and dreaded the day when all hell broke loose...
...South Africa is a country where all dreams are nightmares, or turn into them in time...
...I was still pretending to be the Just White Man, and just white men were obliged to endorse the righteousness of violent revolution...
...Mandela proclaims, "The Soviet Union is a torchbearer for all our hopes and aspirations...
...they see him lurking in the bushes...
...It is a land whose problems cannot all be blamed on apartheid...
...One-eyed Judo was padding along beside me in his bare feet, smiling cheerfully, accompanied by a teenage boy....'It is not safe for you here,' said Judo...
...they hear his footsteps on the path...
...He quickly regrets his decision: "The night was as silent as outer space...
...Neil Alcock is a white man who gives up his life as a prosperous farmer-and eventually his life-to confront Africa, near a place where the human race is thought to have first begun to people the earth...
...We will walk with you...
...At one point he quotes from the speeches of former South African President Pieter Botha and from Winnie Mandela...
...Whites have their own visions dancing in their heads: "The Hammerman's killings raise the specter of indiscriminate black retribution...
...On the other, I wasn't prepared to say so...
...They hear the Hammerman rustling in the garden...
...He left the African frontier a little better than he found it and showed the Zulus, who mourned him with tribal ritual, the face of a Just White Man...
...He provides little cause for optimism...
...Malan concludes, "The time has come to make choices, but there were no rational choices at all...
...Malan traces the history of all this slaughter from the time of Jacques Malan, a Huguenot who fled Louis XIV's France in 1688 and wound up in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope...
...Malan himself has decided to stay and confront Africa, a land of no guarantees, a place where everyone is wondering when the Great Terror will finally erupt...
...the force that held the white tribe together, and kept our sweating white fists locked in a death grip on the levers of power...
...I was walking on the moon...
...In fact, he ends his book with a story, a redemptive account that reads like a parable...
...This is a masterful and disheartening work, for the most part a chronicle of South Africans murdering South Africans, whites killing blacks, blacks killing whites, blacks killing blacks...
...Malan calls him the first white man to come home to Africa to stay...
...Simon actually lives out his terrible vision after his release from prison (a release, by the way, that he resists, knowing what his destiny is...
...He is foiled by both man and the elements, dying at the hands of the people he is trying to help during a tribal battle...
...his shadow falls across the curtain...
...The author bolts into the Soweto streets alone, intent on finding his car and leaving...
...Today, with Botha replaced by F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela free from prison, Malan might be somewhat more positive about his country's future...
...Simon, a Zulu, has been ground down by South Africa...
...In jail for burglary, he breaks white rocks with a hammer day after day...
...The table falls silent...
...I spun around and discovered that the werewolves were phantasms inside my brain...
...After he kills this person, he is taken away, put to death and is free from his torment...
...Alcock's dream is to help the Africans nurture their over-grazed dusty land back to health and productivity...
...Mike, sensing that the author's endorsement of black revolution was a wee bit too enthusiastic, informs the gathering that his white friend is a Malan, of the infamous Afrikaner Malans, who had led the white tribe for centuries in battles against the black tribes...
...Instead he finds stories like that of Simon Mpungose, the Hammerman, who dispatches whites with an ordinary claw hammer while they sleep...
...In South Africa, the middle is a very dangerous place to be...
...Alcock and his wife live on the most remote farm in white South Africa, just across the river from Zulu country...
...His descendent, Rian Malan, a journalist, has decided to return to his homeland to look for answers, to search out slivers of hope in the present...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 18
