My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

by Rian Malan

Overview

A classic of literary nonfiction, My Traitor's Heart has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by readers around the world. Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a centuries-old clan and relative of the architect of apartheid, who fled South Africa after coming face-to-face with the atrocities and terrors of an undeclared civil war between the races. This book is the searing account of his return after eight years of uneasy exile. Armed with new insight and clarity, Malan explores apartheid's legacy of hatred and suffering, bearing witness to the extensive physical and emotional damage it has caused to generations of South Africans on both sides of the color line. Plumbing the darkest recesses of the white and black South African psyches, Malan ultimately finds his way toward the light of redemption and healing. My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing book — beautiful, horrifying, profound, and impossible to put down.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802136848
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/09/2000
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	524,857
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

"It all leads back, in the end, to Dawid Malan and a law formulated on the far bank of the Great Fish River two hundred years ago: You have to put the black man down, plant your foot on his neck, and keep him that way forever, lest he spring up and slit your throat. What would you have me say? That I think apartheid is stupid and vicious? I do. That I'm sorry? I am, I am. That I'm not like the rest of them? If you'd met me a few years ago, in a bar in London or New York, I would have told you that. I would have told you that only I, of all my blind clan and tribe, had eyes that could truly see, and that what I saw appalled me. I would have passed myself off as a political exile, an enlightened sort who took black women into his bed and fled his country rather than carry a gun for the abominable doctrine of white supremacy. You would probably have believed me. I almost believed myself, you see, but in truth I was always one of them. I am a white man born in Africa, and all else flows from there."

Editorial Reviews

Praise for My Traitor's Heart 

“A tremendous book about candor, honor, and race, a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage. No one who reads it could ever forget it.” —Michael Herr

“Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. The remorseless exercise of a reporter’s anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing.” —John le Carr

“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.” —V.S. Naipaul

"Malan is bent on uncovering another level altogether of South African life, and he does so beautifully... He sharply expands our understanding of his strange, strange country’s complexities.” —William Finnegan, The New York Times

“My Traitor’s Heart grips you by the throat and won’t let go.” —Peter Gorner, The Chicago Tribune

“A passionate, blazingly honest testament... Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way." —Christopher Hope, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Rian Malan could always see the story when others had long since lost the plot. Sometimes he went completely off his head as he drew out the fugitive detail, digging in dirt for a diamond, shaking up the grievously overlooked. He tried to escape the word. He went fishing for five years, trying to hide from the relentlessly pursuing plot, but to no avail. When it comes to writing, Malan is dangerously good and there is no getting away.” —Lin Sampson

“A book that is part investigative reportage, part personal confession, and in all respects remarkable... Penetrating, comprehensive, and–in its relentless accumulation of ghastly detail–heartbreaking.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

“Here, as in nothing I’ve read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa... Triumphant.” —Salman Rushdie

“An unflinching and intimate story of a man fighting against injustice in his homeland, even as he must come to terms with his own family’s poisonous role there.” —Austin Merrill, Vanity Fair

From the Publisher

Written with smoldering moral outrage, this odyssey offers a firsthand glimpse of South African apartheid and its practitioners' rationalizations. The author grew up in a white Johannesburg suburb; his great-uncle Daniel Malan was the first Afrikaner nationalist prime minister and an architect of today's racist system. The author, a youthful leftist, then a crime reporter, left his homeland in 1977 to become a Los Angeles rock 'n' roll critic, returning to South Africa in 1985. His blistering book combines autobiography, reportage, coming to terms with his ancestral roots and loosely-stitched-together tales of murder and violence committed predominantly by whites. He claims that, for fear of being branded racists, white liberals avoid discussing certain topics, such as atrocities committed by blacks in the name of the anti-apartheid struggle and blacks' involvement in animistic religions. He sees no ready solutions in the fight to change an oppressive system. Author tour. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This soul-searching account of an Afrikaner's life in apartheid South Africa joins a growing body of publications by South Africans of every ethnic group. Malan, the grand nephew of a major definer of the doctrine of apartheid, Daniel Malan, left South Africa in 1977, in part to avoid military service, and returned eight years later. This book reports his observations of violent death in the land. He details instances of whites killing blacks, blacks killing blacks, blacks killing whites, politically motivated murder, and economically motivated murder. Well written, gripping, and disturbing, the descriptions leave one with a sense of despair which makes Malan's final note of hope all the more remarkable. Recommended for adult general readers as well as those with a special interest in South Africa.-- Maidel Cason, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark

Library Journal