My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience
368
My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience
368Overview
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).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802193902 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 943,774 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
“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 Carré
“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
“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
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BOOK I
LIFE IN THIS STRANGE PLACE
How do I live in this strange place?
— BERNOLDUS NIEMAND, from the Boer reggae song "Reggae Vibes Is Cool"
I'm burned out and starving to death, so I'm just going to lay this all upon you and trust that you're a visionary reader, because the grand design, such as it is, is going to be hard for you to see. I know you're interested in my ancestors, so I guess I should begin at the very beginning. I am a Malan, descendant of Jacques Malan, a Huguenot who fled the France of Louis XIV to escape being put to the sword for his Protestant faith. He sought refuge among the Dutch, only to be put aboard ship in 1688 and sent to the Dark Continent, to the rude Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. Jacques the Huguenot was the first Malan in Africa. In the centuries since, a Malan has been present at all the great dramas and turning points in the history of the Afrikaner tribe.
Jacques tamed the Cape and planted vineyards. His sons built gracious gabled homesteads in the lee of Table Mountain. His grandson Dawid the Younger ran off to the wild frontier in 1788, where he fought the savage Xhosa and took part in Slagtersnek, the first Afrikaner rebellion against the British.
Hercules, son of Dawid the Younger, led the third wave of Voortrekkers into the heart of Africa. In February 1838 he sat in the kraal of the great king Dingaan, watching a huge Zulu army wheeling back and forth on the plain. The sun glinted off thousands of spears. Feet thundered in unison. Clouds of dust rose into the sky. And then Dingaan cried, "Kill the wizards," and Hercules and his seventy companions were murdered — stakes driven up their anuses, skulls smashed with stones, and their bodies left on a hill for the vultures.
Once the killing was done, King Dingaan pointed, and his army set off for the north at a run. They ran all day and most of the night, and it was still dark when they fell on the main Trekker party. The attack was unexpected. Men were disemboweled, women mutilated, and the brains of small children dashed out on wagon wheels. In all, 530 Trekkers died that dawn, in a place we still call Weenen — the Place of Weeping.
In the aftermath, the survivors drew their wagons into a circle on the bank of a nameless river and made ready for the final battle. On its eve, they laid hands on the Bible and swore a covenant with Jehovah: If he granted them victory over the heathen, they would hold true to his ways forever. A Malan was there — Jacob Jacobus Malan, brother of the fallen Hercules. As the sun rose on December 16, he saw something amazing: rank upon rank of Zulu warriors sitting silently on their haunches, waiting for the mist to rise. Two hours later, the river was red with black blood, and it was no longer nameless: It was Blood River. Mountains of Zulus lay dead on the battlefield, but not a single Boer was slain. It was surely a miracle, a sign that God's will was ours.
So we remember Jacob Jacobus Malan and still honor his solemn covenant. We also remember his sons Jacobus and Hercules, who survived the Zulu wars, dragged their covered wagons over the mountains, and smashed the black tribes on the high plain. There, on conquered land, they established Boer republics, where white men were free to rule blacks in accord with their stern Jehovistic covenant.
In 1881, Hercules Malan the second sat on an African hilltop watching another seminal event in the white tribe's bloody saga — the Battle of Majuba, turning point in our first war against the British. Kommandant Malan's soldiers were an undisciplined rabble of farm boys and graybeards, but they could drop a buck at a thousand yards, and every bullet counted. The redcoats were annihilated, and the British retired to lick their wounds. A few years later, however, gold was discovered on our land, and they came after us in earnest. In that next war — the Second War of Freedom — our forces were outnumbered nine to one. The largest army yet assembled on the planet rolled across our frontiers and occupied our towns. We fought on, though. A Malan was there, too: General Wynand Malan, the bravest of the brave, leader of a guerrilla band that ranged deep into enemy territory. To crush our resistance, the British scorched the earth and put Afrikaner women and children in concentration camps, but General Malan fought on to the bittersweet end, taking a bullet on the war's very last day.
In the aftermath, we became a backward peasantry, despised by our British bosses and betters. But we rose again, with yet another Malan at the fore — Daniel François Malan. His Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948, vowing to throw off the imperial British yoke and devise a final solution for the "native question." This final solution was apartheid, a gridlock of more than a hundred laws designed to keep blacks and whites forever separate and to ensure, not at all coincidentally, that blacks remained in their God-ordained place, hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever.
This fate was unacceptable to blacks, so they rose against us in earnest in 1976, in a rebellion that has never really ceased since. In this era, too, the destiny of the tribe is in the hands of a Malan — General Magnus Malan, minister of defense. There are those who say it is he who truly controls the country, through the awesome power of the white military, and through a network of secretive paramilitary entities called Joint Management Centers. In these troubled times, the name Malan is often heard on the lips of black comrades, in the chanted litany of those who will die when the day comes. I see them at the township rallies, thousands upon thousands of them, running to and fro in tight formation. Their feet thunder in unison. Their faces glisten with sweat and excitement Dust rises. They cradle imaginary AK-47s in their arms, and chant, "Voetsek, Malan!" Fuck off, Malan! Fuck off! Fuck off! And then they wheel in formation and thunder away to the far side of some dusty township stadium, leaving me poised on a cusp of history.
There is only one war here, you see, the war that was and is and yet will be. I don't know how it will end, but I can tell you where it began. It began in the 1780s, on the eastern frontier of the old Cape Colony, and a Malan, inevitably, was there.
I found him in the national archives in Cape Town, buried in the index underneath a cryptic "M." The entry referred to a trial held in 1788, but the felon's name was not revealed. He was just M. It was the only entry of its kind. I thought, here lies some secret, some truth long obscured, so I asked to see the records of this two-hundred-year-old trial. The story they revealed was myth made flesh, the destiny of a nation embodied in the fate of a single man.
On the outskirts of Cape Town, beside a four-lane freeway, stands a pair of whitewashed pillars and an imposing wrought-iron gate. Behind the gate, in a grove of oak and chestnut trees, lies the homestead Vergelegen, one of the finest remaining examples of an architectural style called Cape Dutch. The house is achingly lovely to the eye, a symphony of whitewashed walls, flowing gables, dark thatch, wooden shutters and huge yellowwood doors that open on the cool gloom of tiled interiors. Two centuries ago, it was the home of one Dawid Malan, the man behind the M.
Dawid Malan was born in 1750, son of Dawid the Elder and grandson of Jacques the Patriarch. At the age of twenty-four, and by virtue of a shrewd marriage to his cousin Elizabeth, he became master of Vergelegen, then the finest estate in the entire Cape Colony. Vergelegen stood at the foot of the Hottentot's Holland Mountains, a day's horseride from the shores of Table Bay.
In Dawid's time, the Cape was already a tame, orderly place. Lions and elephants were a fading memory, and the yellow-skinned Hottentot tribes living there when whites first came had long since been driven off or turned into servants and herders. From his rooftop, Dawid would have looked out upon a breathtaking tableau of vineyards, golden wheat fields, whitewashed farmhouses, and purple mountains. In the distance, at the foot of Table Mountain, stood a great stone castle flying the flag of the mighty Dutch East India Company. Under its ramparts lay a bustling wharf where merchantmen bound for the Spice Islands of the Orient took on fresh food, water, and wine.
Above the castle, on the slopes of the mountain, stood a city of great beauty. Cape Town struck one early visitor as a place of "elegant and capacious dwellings," inhabited by people of "general intelligence and cultured politeness." Travelers were invariably astonished to discover so charming and civilized a settlement in such an unlikely place. In Cape Town, the gentry sported powdered wigs and danced the minuet in the castle's ballroom. They built schools and churches, employed learned pastors and pedagogues. They had heard of Rousseau and Voltaire, and there were even some Free Thinkers among them. Cape Town was a tiny outpost of Europe, an enclave of the Enlightenment at the foot of the Dark Continent.
In this community, in the year 1788, Dawid the Younger was a citizen of great substance. As master of Vergelegen, he was a rich man, owner of a score of slaves, twice that many horses, and more than fifty thousand vinestocks. His father was a candidate for a seat on the citizen's council that advised the Dutch governor on matters of policy; his uncle, an elder of the Dutch Reformed Church. Dawid himself was a colonel in the Burger Dragoons, the citizens' militia. He had an upstanding wife, four young children, and a neighbor named Jurgen Radijn.
Radijn was a German, a mercenary who had recently retired from the service of the Dutch East India Company and settled on an estate called Harmonie. Among Radijn's many possessions was a slave girl named Sara, who gave birth that year to a son. Her master would normally have taken pleasure in this increase in his human flock, but this child was a half-breed, and that meant money out of his pocket: The children of slave and Christian had to be baptized, educated, and eventually freed, and Sara's child, by the look of it, had surely been fathered by a Christian. Radijn was incensed. Someone had been tampering with his brood stock, so to speak. He demanded the man's name, but Sara refused to answer. She swore to don a man's clothing and run away if a hand was laid upon her, then turned her face to the wall. Under the circumstances, there was little Radijn could do but keep a close watch on the errant girl and make sure that she remained henceforth chaste.
Late one night, Radijn's wife was awakened by the barking of dogs. She looked outside and saw a shadow stealing across the courtyard below her window. She waited. A while later, two shadowy figures came out of the dark and disappeared into the door of the slave quarters. This was the moment Mother Radijn was waiting for. She gathered up her nightdress and tiptoed after them. In the slave quarters, she lit a taper and held it aloft. Sara was lying in her cot, feigning sleep. Mother Radijn was not fooled. She summoned the intruder forth. At that, a white man crawled out from under Sara's bed and stood up, naked save for his stockings. It was Dawid Malan, master of Vergelegen. "Mother Radijn," he said lamely, "this is not what you think it to be."
For masters to sleep with slaves was not unheard-of, but it was done discreetly, furtively. It was a breaking of caste and, worse yet, a violation of Calvinist piety. So there was a minor scandal when Malan's philandering first came to light, but it was nothing compared with what was to come. Dawid seemed obsessed with the slave girl, and refused to give her up. He took to lurking around Harmonie's homestead, trying to catch a glimpse of her. He waylaid Radijn's slaves in the fields and begged them to carry secret messages to her. It was outrageous. In the court case in which these doings were subsequently aired, witness after witness stepped forward to tell of their shock at Malan's behavior, and of the dire warnings of God's punishment they had issued to him. Dawid scorned their advice, and his conduct became the talk of the colony. His wife kicked him out of her bed, the Church shunned him as a fornicator, and Radijn, in a final effort to put an end to the shameful affair, took the child from Sara's breast and sent her to live with Jan de Vos, keeper of tolls on a distant mountain pass. De Vos was instructed to keep Sara indoors at all times, and Dawid Malan at bay.
The toll-keeper tried, but he had to leave his home from time to time. One day, a slave informed de Vos that something curious had happened while he was away. A white man had crept into his cottage, spoken to Sara, and then slipped quietly away. Who was it? The slave had no idea.
On the night of August 11, Dawid Malan rose from his bed and crept into Vergelegen's stables. He saddled two horses, loaded them with provisions, powder, and shot. And then he rode out into the night and started climbing the pass that led over the Hottentot's Holland Mountains and away from Cape Town. In his day, the pass was just a rough track that wound tortuously up the hillside, following a path worn centuries earlier by herds of migrating antelope. Near the stone cottage of the toll-keeper, Malan whistled like a bird, and a woman materialized out of the darkness. Sara mounted Dawid's spare horse, and they rode on up the pass together.
It was a long and grueling climb, so dawn was probably breaking by the time they reached the mountain's crest. If his eyes were keen, Dawid might have seen a frenzied scurrying between the tiny farmhouses far below. Finding two horses missing, Elizabeth Malan had broken into her estranged husband's bedroom and discovered his bed unslept-in. She galloped over to Harmonie, tears streaming down her face, and told Jurgen Radijn, who instantly dispatched a rider to check on Sara's whereabouts. She, too, was gone; her guardian, the toll-keeper de Vos, was out on the mountainside with his flintlock and his dogs, searching for the spoor. Radijn's messenger wheeled and rode off to raise the alarm. The fugitives had to make haste.
Ahead of Dawid and Sara lay a cool, high plain called Overberg, the land beyond the mountains. They pushed on across it, riding as hard as they could. On the third day of their flight, an inquisitive militiaman barred their way, and Malan was forced to give a false name, and a false account of himself. He claimed to be Jan Nortjé of Cape Town, and introduced his dark-skinned companion as his wife. After that, they avoided farms and settlements, although a sharp-eyed widow spotted them as they skirted the town of Goudini. Beyond Goudini lay the Breede River. In Dutch, breede means "broad," and there was only one way to cross such a river — by ferry.
The ferryman, one Abraham Finnerholm, was surprised to see a well-horsed white gentleman on his landing. Such gentry seldom passed his way. Finnerholm couldn't help asking his name. "I am Jan Nortjé," said the stranger. The ferryman asked his business, but the traveler gave no reply. All this was most unusual. The details lodged in the ferryman's memory, and when the pursuers galloped up to his landing a few days later he was able to give them an unmistakable description of Dawid Malan and the missing slave girl.
Beyond the ferry, Dawid and Sara drew away from the Cape, where nature was benign. The landscapes across which they now crawled were arid, and empty. The green grass of the Cape gave way to dust and rocks and thorns. The ridges above them were lined by spiny aloes, each as tall as a man, a watchful sentinel against the sky. They were drawing closer to the frontier, to Africa. There were few people, no permanent settlements. After about two weeks of hard riding, they came to a wild canyon cut deep into the earth by a muddy brown river. This was the Great Fish River, the Cape Colony's outermost frontier. Ahead lay the howling wilderness, full of wild beasts and hostile savages; behind, the scaffold for Dawid Malan, death by strangulation for his runaway slave lover.
Dawid's first life was over; he must have known he would never return to the Cape. The Dragoons were on his trail, but they would turn back short of the frontier and return to the castle with the evidence they had gathered. A trial would be held, and Malan found guilty in absentia of stealing a slave. The Council of Justice would issue a decree banishing him from the Dutch colony forever. His disgraced father would disown him, the authorities strip him of his rank in the burger cavalry, and his bitter wife attempt to have him declared dead. He had sacrificed everything for the love of a black woman.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Traitor's Heart"
by .
Copyright © 1990 Rian Malan.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.