My Traitor's Heart

I just finished reading an extremely honest book that I'd like to recommend to all of you looking for a good read and thinking, "there must be some way for me to catch up with my South African history and knowledge." It's called My Traitor's Heart, and it is written by Rian Malan, descendant of former Prime Minister D.F. Malan.

The Malan family are Afrikaners, and so Rian's understanding of South Africa is filtered through an inevitably supremacist ideology. D.F. Malan was the first Nationalist Prime Minister, a member of the entirely-Afrikaner party. He was one of the first and "best" architects of apartheid, a strong believer in socialist and Calvinist world order--in his own view. Says D.F. Malan of the then-future of South Africa and apartheid, "Socialism has done an invaluable service to humanity, and not the least to Christianity itself, by turning its searchlights on the evils of the existing system. We hope and pray that Christianity and socialism may be so guided in their future development that the deep yearning, the widespread movements, and even the passions and the violence of the age may prove to be but the birthpangs of a better social world." Wow. A better social world through the oppression of the masses. In great honesty, many white South Africans will tell you that while the world might not have been better under apartheid, it was much certainly easier. Everyone was given a place in society and there existed an easily-defined code of conduct for every individual based on his or her race.

Rian Malan discusses his evolution as a liberal Afrikaaner who did not believe in the apartheid system and eventually moved to the States in order to avoid being drafted into an army with whose motives he didn't agree. After his return to South Africa, he was forced to face his paradox--the idea that he "loved" blacks, but could never truly "trust" blacks, due to his upbringing. He discusses this as the ideological problem central to most whites in South Africa--a want to love and an disability, though maybe not an inability, to trust. He grew up in scary times--the 1970s and 1980s when apartheid was at its worst and most violent. Here is a quote from one of my favorite parts of the book:

"In 1510, Portuguese Viscount D'Almeida came in peace, but the sight of his white skin and strange vessel struck terror in the hearts of Hottentots on the shores of Table Bay, so they killed him, and we've been slaughtering one another in fear ever since. Dawid Malan and the Xhosa slaughtered one another along the Great Fish River for sixty years, and then the Boers trekked into the interior, where they ran into the mighty Zulus. The Voortrekker leader Piet Retief approached the Zulu king Dingaan under a white flag, but Dingaan feared him, and murdered him and all his party. The Afrikaners never forgot Dingaan's treachery. After that, we always shot before we saw the whites of black eyes, and then, in 1948, we invented apartheid, to keep blacks so far away that we couldn't see them at all.
"At one point in the fifties, Nelson Mandela's ANC was willing to settle for sixty seats in the white Parliament. The Afrikaners feared black domination, though, and thought they could keep blacks down forever, so they spurned Mandela's humble demands and tried to crush his movement. Three decades later, Botha had second thoughts, and extended a tentative hand of friendship across the racial divide. By then, blacks were also contaminated by fear and hatred, so they struck his hand away, and we spiraled on down toward mutual annihilation. We always seemed to miss each other in the murk of our mutually baffling cultures and our mutually blinding fears."

Being from the Southern U.S., I understand this paradox. I can feel it in most of the interactions I have with people of other races. I hate the paradox, and yet can't always let it go, no matter how hard I try. Likewise, I know many who see the paradox from the other side around. We all have been brought up in such a way that we now have a want to love and a disability to trust. I am thankful to have found a book that put my difficulty into words in such an eloquent way.

This is a great and compelling read--you should easily find it on Amazon, if you're interested.