A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures.
So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return eight years later, bored and homesick. My Traitor’s Heart was his attempt to come to terms with his hate-filled, colour-obsessed, violent country of birth, and if you haven’t read it, well, you should.
The Lion Sleeps Tonight is a more serene work, and so it should be. It’s fashionable at the moment to shake one’s head at events unfolding in South Africa: the flamboyant corruption of the Zuma administration, the continuing inequality, the trouble at the mines. But when Malan was writing My Traitor’s Heart, a far, far darker future was prophesied, and terror of what looked like an inevitable civil war haunted his every page.
The approaching cataclysm was miraculously averted, thanks to the deal struck between F.W. de Klerk’s exiting administration and Nelson Mandela’s incoming ANC. Showing a generosity doomsayers thought impossible, South Africa’s black majority did not wreak bloody vengeance on its former white oppressors. ‘The gift of 1994 was so huge that I choked on it and couldn’t say thank you,’ Malan movingly admits in ‘The Apocalypse that Wasn’t’, one of the articles in this collection.
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