small of Rian Malan’s great book, My Traitor’s Heart; but the division in his heart—an Afrikaner for nine generations—is the basic and bloody 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 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 nobly. 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: “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 skyscrapers 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 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 Alcock. 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.
Their first idea had been to start a cattle co-operative. Pasturage could then be controlled by segments in this