TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041690/0416471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 131 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 79

Cries of the Beloved Country


By STEFAN KANFER


THE MIND OF SOUTH AFRICA
by Allister Sparks
Knopf; 448 pages; $24.95

JANUARY SUN
by Richard Stengel
Simon & Schuster; 202 pages; $19.95

MY TRAITOR'S HEART
by Rian Malan
Atlantic Monthly; 349 pages; $19.95


    Three million years ago, humanity was born in East Africa.
Last February it was reborn in South Africa. More than one man
was liberated when Nelson Mandela stepped into the sunlight;
an entire nation appealed for release from the prison of
apartheid.

    Allister Sparks, a white journalist, was born and raised in
that prison, and his authoritative work -- one of three
investigations into South Africa being published just as that
nation has assumed a new moral significance -- reduces previous
histories to the status of antiques. His title, The Mind of
South Africa, is a misnomer: the nation has many minds, most
of them in conflict. The sharpest divisions, Sparks observes,
originated in the 19th century, when immigrant Boers -- the
Dutch word for farmers -- feuded with their English overlords
in the Cape Colony. When Britain forbade slavery, the Boers'
Great Trek began. Kipling caught their spirit: "His neighbours'
smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest./ He
shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed."


    En route the trekkers were outnumbered by hostile Zulu
warriors, but spears were no match for cannons. Any hope for
reconciliation vanished when diamonds and gold were found in
the interior. The discovery, says Sparks, produced "the
watershed event in South African history. Overnight it turned
a pastoral country into an industrial one, sucking country folk
into the city and changing their lives." By-products of the
mines included pass laws; "native" compounds that separated
workers from their families; escalating categories of black,
colored and European; ruthless cartels; and the world's first
concentration camps, built by Britain during the Boer War of
1899-1902.

    By the 1920s de facto apartheid was a feature of South
African life. The poorest whites possessed something that the
most prosperous blacks could never have: the vote. Subsequent
governments flirted with Nazi Germany, then embraced liberal
policies, but the racism endured. With all the warm
pronunciations of President F.W. de Klerk, it prevails even
amid the current talk of reforms.

    Sparks is familiar with life in the townships and cities,
but the ethos of contemporary South Africa is conveyed with
even greater intensity in Richard Stengel's January Sun.
Stengel, a TIME contributor, has the eye of a Leica and the
sensitivity of a light meter. He focuses on a single day in the
Transvaal town of Brits, where three men spend their separate,
unequal lives. Ronald de la Rey, a white veterinarian, parrots
the Boer tradition: "I think the idea of apartheid makes you
more aware of the differences between people than the
similarities. It's in our subconscious. But we like it that
way. Everyone keeps their own identity."

    For a placid taxi driver called Life, that identity means
confinement to a segregated township. There, boredom and
despair are as palpable as the omnipresent automobile carcasses
and piles of beer cans. Jaiprakash Bhula is an educated Indian
haberdasher, contemptuous of racial decrees. His question gnaws
at South African policy: If whites really believed they were
better, "would it be necessary to create laws guaranteeing
social, monetary, and political superiority?"

    Throughout, Stengel maintains a tone of cool detachment, but
his epilogue contains a mordant irony: De la Rey and Bhula
carry on, but on the morning of May 21, 1989, Life is stabbed
to death, presumably by black men who believe the driver was
"too conciliatory to the authorities." The burial occurs on a
work day. "Under the state's emergency regulations, funerals
like Life's cannot be held on weekends. Only a handful of
people made it to the burial."

    In My Traitor's Heart, Rian Malan, a young white South
African journalist, has one major subject: Rian Malan. His
intense and angry memoir offers a series of South African
impressions: the author as exiled hippie in America; the author
as pariah in his native land; blacks under fire, with a
prominent figure of the author.

    As the most personal of the books, it is in some ways the
most powerful. But Malan's self-absorption obscures his
extraordinary credentials. He is a relative of Daniel F. Malan,
one of the architects of apartheid. Rian becomes the righteous
recorder of black rage in the "charnel house" of Soweto, the
largest black township created by that apartheid. Alas, the
conflict of genealogy and emotion tends to produce more heat
than light. In a typical episode, Malan recalls a psychopath
who murdered whites with a hammer; Simon Mpungose's story
"seemed to unfold like the story of a saint, deeply disturbing
in its biblical parallels." This romantic notion of violence
feels like a hangover from the '60s, and it has no place in a
South Africa that aspires to a place in the community of
civilized nations.

    Yet for all of his apocalyptic outrage, Malan succeeds by
making the same leap of faith as his colleagues: he too
believes that South Africa is capable of change. Thus far the
evidence supports them. Only a few years ago, the government
in Pretoria vowed to hold the racial line forever. Today it has
come to recognize the inarguable truth that underlies all three
books. George Bernard Shaw uttered it long ago, when apartheid
was young: "Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of
us occupies the cells."