The South African way of death
Samantha Weinberg
MY TRAITOR'S HEART by Rian Malan
Bodley Head, £14.95, pp. 349
In 1985, Simon Mpungose, the Empangeni Hammerman, murdered four white people in their beds, smashing their heads until their skulls turned into pulp. Two others ended up in intensive care. His reign of terror in the comfortable suburbs bordering on Zululand, shook the white Community to their bones, made them reach for their guns andibreinforced the paranoia and prejudices that divide blacks from whites in South Africa.
Simon was sentenced to death and in due time would have been remembered only as an example, pulled occasionally out of the memory banks to illustrate the need for security in white households perhaps, or to explain why majority rule is impossible. That is if Rian Malan, a South African and an Afrikaner, had not decided to dip further into Simon's past, to look behind the crimes he had committed, and the dream he had had in prison some years earlier which had revealed that his ipsiwo', his destiny, was to kill whites. Malan spent a year trying to find out about Simon, and the story he unearths is not only a chilling testimony against apartheid, but even more so, one against members of Simon's tribe who had declared him an outcast at his birth and shunned him ever since. Rian Malan's book, in which Simon's story is only one of 'Six Tales of Ordinary Murder' through which he seeks to explain the way that South Africans relate to each other, arrives at the horrific truth that this can be best done by examining the way in which they kill each other. And unlike so many other books written about South Africa, it comes up with no conclusion, no prescription, not even a strong condemna- tion of any of the different groups. Instead it unearths a seething psychedelic mass of contradictions and paradoxes.
The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with the history of the Malan clan, themselves at the heart of the development of apartheid, which is argu- ably responsible for South Africa's current bloody tint. The history of the Malans' involvement with apartheid started in the 18th century, with
Dawid Malan and a law formulated on the far bank of the Great Fish River 200 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 white throat.
The history continues with Daniel Francois (DF) Malan who, in 1948, became the first Nationalist Prime Minister of South Africa and spent the next years formalising the diabolical plan of apartheid. This is the book that Rian Malan origi- nally returned from eight years of Califor- nian exile to write. However, after starting his research, he found that he was prepar- ing to write the kind of things that other people wanted to hear about the country, and, in doing so, he was betraying his innermost feelings about South Africa and its people. So instead, he decided to bare his heart and the history of the Malans ends with the story of Rian Malan himself, his youthful rebellion and rejection of many early beliefs.
The second section looks at six murder cases — whites killing blacks, blacks killing whites, and blacks killing blacks — of the kind that are reported every day in the newspapers, but often have little effect, for if we do not know the person involved, the names mean little and consequently evoke little sympathy. By revealing something of the history behind the victims and their murderers, Rian Malan manages to bring their chilling stories into our hearts. His writing in this section is at times dispassion- ate, but this only serves to increase the effect: each example throws a thunderbolt against our chests. Yet in the final analysis, what becomes shockingly apparent is that there is a similarity in each of the cases, and that no matter the colour of the perpetrator or the victim, every one of them is a brutal example of the deteriorat- ing value of human life in South Africa today.
The final section tells possibly the most compelling murder story of all. Neil Alcock, with his wife Creina, gave up everything to devote time, money and love trying to help the Zulus of Msinga achieve a certain measure of peace and prosperity. He died in the attempt, at the hands of some of the people he was trying to help, and now Creina, armed only with her love, is battling against all adversity to continue his work. If Rian Malan holds any hope for the future of this country, it is in people like Creina.
At the end of his research into Simon Mpungose's story, Rian Malan writes:
In my time, in my country, white men assumed that they were the centre of the black universe — that they had subjugated the dreams and psyches of Africans, along with their bodies. It simply wasn't true. That is what Simon taught me.
I cannot say what all this means, but I do know that religion and culture are forces of awesome power, and that nations are to some extent welded together by shared languages, shared religious and cultural mythology. After a year of pursuing the truth of Simon, I was no longer sure that such commonality existed in South Africa. I prayed it did, though, and that we would all find it in time. Without it, I feared we were doomed.
My Traitor's Heart is a powerful and brilliant book. It is like one man's long and naked run through his past and his mind, at the same time shocking and exciting. Rian Malan writes with so much personal feeling and style, that it is impossible for the reader who has any connection or interest in South Africa, to be unaffected by his words.
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