Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but has only now found a UK publisher. Eben Venter — one of the notable voices in white South African writing post-Apartheid — has been ‘temporarily’ based in Australia for more than two decades, but returns to his home for stories. You can see why.
After Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee emigrated to Australia — and hasn’t published a decent novel since. He evacuated his subject. For Africa-born whites, the one thing worse than staying is leaving. The left brain urges you to settle in a safe economy with prospects, where the right brain dies. Africa’s contradictions are the author’s larder, hung with the biltong of sinewy emotions.
Out of such emotions Venter created this modern retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Marlouw, an Afrikaner in Melbourne, is persuaded by his sister to fly back to SA to retrieve his prodigal nephew Koert, who has gone to ground on Ouplaas, the old family farm. Venter sketches a dystopian near-future South Africa where the state has failed, gangs rule and all is corrupt, derelict, cut off, impoverished and diseased.
On Ouplaas, the Africans who were handed the farm by Marlouw’s family decades earlier have multiplied: ‘Children to the left and the mongrels to the right.’ They quarrel about booze and sex, the last of the sheep are dying, the tractor’s kaput, boreholes are broken and it’s overgrazed. Marlouw asks a youth in gold trainers:
‘How can you survive on a farm where there’s no more water? You’ll have to leave. Aren’t you worried about that?’
He spits on his index finger and buffs his Nikes. ‘No…’
Yet Marlouw finds the Africans in thrall to Koert, looking to him for a supply of nyama (meat), Bell’s whisky and the use of his Nintendo.
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