came to resemble Europe in the Dark Ages. Although he wrote a number of op-ed pieces attributing the crime to bad social conditions, he realized, in opposition to some white assumptions about innate black criminality, that the matter was not as simple as that.

One of the great merits of My Traitor’s Heart is that Malan has the honesty and intelligence to look deep inside his own heart, and to confess that the picture he liked to present of himself as the Just White Man was not the entire truth. In examining his own “secret racist heart” he succeeds in illuminating the complexity of race relations in South Africa, the frightening collision of two alien cultures. At the core of the book lies a paradox, which Malan identifies but can never fully resolve. During his years as a reporter, he began to realize that although he had always loved blacks, he had always been scared of them as well; he hated the injustices which had been done to them, but was horrified by the violence they were capable of both against whites and against themselves. Fear gripped him whenever he ventured into Soweto, and he began to question whether he was really on the side of the blacks. Seeing only nihilism and rage in the Soweto uprising, he feared that the violence might eventually swallow him up too, simply because his skin was white. Civil war broke out in his own brain.

In 1977 Malan left South Africa, partly to avoid the military draft (he decided he was not going to carry a gun for apartheid), but mainly because he was afraid of what the future held for South Africa. Unable to choose one side or the other, and aware that there seemed to be no middle ground, he ran away from the paradox. After traveling through Europe for a few years he ended up in Los Angeles in 1979, writing rock and roll reviews for a small music magazine. During the time Malan was in the United States, Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, died in police custody; Pieter Botha came to power and instituted some liberalizing reforms, which were followed in 1984 by a fresh outbreak of violence and black rebellion. As more and more whites fled the country, Malan began to feel himself a traitor to everyone—to his black friends on The Star, to the Afrikaners, and to himself. Feeling that he was not facing up to the situation in which history had placed him, he returned to South Africa, to resume work as a crime reporter and to resolve the paradox “in tales of the way we killed one another.”

In part 2 of My Traitor’s Heart, Malan traces the lives and deaths of many different types of South African individuals, black and white, who were caught up in the tragedy of the times. Malan’s vivid narrative produces some moving human stories; a recurring theme is that nothing has really changed from the days of frontier violence between Boer and black in the early period of white colonization (“Once frontier, still frontier.”)

Many of the stories are both heartbreaking and horrifying, and Malan does not spare his reader the grisly details. One example is of a black man named Dennis Mosheshwe, who made the mistake of being “cheeky” to his wife’s Boer employer. Mosheshwe was kidnapped and taken to a group of Boers—men, women, and children—who were enjoying a traditional braaivleis (an open-air barbecue). Just to teach him a lesson, the black man was beaten, tied up, and subjected to a barbaric torture which finally killed him. The white man responsible for his death later received a seven-year prison term. On the same day he was sentenced, a member of the banned African National Congress, who had been caught in possession of revolutionary pamphlets, received a ten-year term.

Then there was the story of young Moses Mope, told to Malan by his father. Moses was a church-going teenager from a black township outside Pretoria. He took no part in politics, but one night he and some of his companions were mistaken by the police for “comrades” (black activists). In the chase that followed, Moses Mope was set upon and beaten to death by a white policeman. A police constable was later charged with culpable homicide, but was acquitted. Mope was only one of 750 blacks to die in thirteen months of violence which began in 1984.

But there is another side to the violence: For example, an idealistic, white, foreign doctor who worked in a black hospital in Soweto, was knocked off his motorcycle and attacked by a mob wielding steel fence poles—a victim of what Malan calls the “law of genetic complicity,” under which any white person, whether they sympathized with the black cause or not, might become a target for murder. One of the most harrowing tales is of a murderer known as the Hammerman, who bludgeoned four whites to death with a hammer while they slept in their beds at night in the town of Empangeni, ninety miles north of Durban. Malan uses the story as a symbol of the fear and sense of guilt under which white South Africans live. The Hammerman, who turned out to be a thirty-five-year-old black named Simon Mpungose, became a hero to the local Zulus. Malan calls him a black Everyman, a classic case of a man warped by apartheid. Following a hopelessly deprived childhood, the Hammerman had ended up in Barberton Prison, the most notorious in the country, where he tried several times to commit suicide. During his incarceration he had a prophetic dream in which he killed a white person with the hammer that he used to break rocks. Given that he was a Zulu, he interpreted the dream as a message from his ancestors which revealed his destiny. Fulfilling it would relieve him of his torment. Although he tried hard to resist the command, he eventually accepted his destiny, and at his trial he frequently said that he was now at peace and ready to die.

Malan uses the story to exemplify the clash of irreconcilable cultures in South Africa—a recurring theme of the book. Beliefs and practices that are difficult for the Western mind to understand flourish among black South Africans. Many of them, for example, put their beds on stacks of bricks to thwart a ground- hugging night gremlin called the tokoloshe; in 1985, there were 10,000sangomas and inyangas (witch doctors, or traditional healers) practicing in greater Johannesburg, who were consulted by 85 percent of all black households. In one violent industrial dispute, a witch doctor promised that his medicine could turn the white man’s bullets into water, and this accounted for the lack of fear shown by black workers when confronted with a water cannon. For Malan, this brings out a curious paradox: White liberals in South Africa tend to ignore these cultural differences, because to acknowledge them would seem to play into the hands of one of apartheid’s underlying tenets—that there are immutable distinctions between races. Malan also believes that the picture of South Africa presented in the American media is a false one, consisting mostly of “caricatural white villains and black victims,” and largely ignoring the horrific black-on-black violence (people having their ears lopped off for breaking boycotts, for example, or being forced to drink detergent for violating “don’t buy white” campaigns, not to mention the unspeakably vicious internecine warfare, much of it conducted by teenagers, between the Black Consciousness movement and the combined African National Congress and United Democratic Front).

Having carefully guided his reader through this modern-day hell, Malan does his best to conclude on a note of hope. He tells the extraordinary story of a courageous white couple, Neil and Creina Alcock, who chose to settle in the barren district of Msinga, in one of the self-governing Zulu homelands. For twenty years they lived like black Africans, sharing their privations and learning to see African problems through African eyes. Neil Alcock pioneered agricultural development projects in the most unpromising places, using African methods and African technologies. For a time these projects met with considerable success, before the inhospitable climate defeated their best efforts. Even though the story ended in betrayal—Neil Alcock met a violent death, caught in the crossfire between rival Zulu factions—the Zulus venerated his memory almost as one of their own, and Malan believes that the Alcocks’ “investment of love” in this forgotten part of Africa possesses permanent significance. It offers a glimpse of “light beyond the darkness—a tiny pinprick of dawning possibilities, casting just enough of a glow to show the rest of us the way.” Although this seems more like the visionary hope of the poet than the reasoned optimism of the political analyst, the reader will be grateful for the tranquility it offers as the conclusion to a book which for the most part burns in the mind like angry fire.

Sources for Further Study

London Review of Books. XII, April 19, 1990, p.9.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 4, 1990, p. 1.

Maclean’s. CIII, February 5’ 1990, p.65.

The Nation. CCLI, July 30, 1990, p.134.

New York. XXIII, January 15, 1990, p.59.

The New York Times Book Review. XCV, January 21, 1990, p.3.

The New Yorker. LXVI, May 7, 1990, p.110.

Newsweek. CXV, January 22, 1990, p.63.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVI, November 10, 1989, p.52.

Time. CXXXV, April 16, 1990, p.79.

The Times Literary Supplement. May 4, 1990, p.482.

The Washington Post Book World. XX, January 21, 1990, p.3.