Anywhere south of Rome horrifies me, frankly.
– Bruce Robinson
2006
3 June, Saturday
In the afternoon, in Listowel, J. M. Coetzee brought the pain. It was hot enough in the hotel function room that overlooks the river and racecourse but his story about agri-tourism in an arid region of South Africa eroded the will to live. Then he read from his work in progress (“Diary 2005”). It was hardly accidental, the applause that had filled a gap between sheets in the first reading, but, given the title of the second, was it any wonder that J. said, “I think this guy is paranoid from writer’s block.” Queuing up for the signing of J’s books afterwards, I thought Coetzee looked very seventeenth-century Dutch, which does have an association with total humourlessness. To try and humour him, I said that, being Irish, I was interested in countries like South Africa and Australia that also had a history of settlement. He looked at me blankly before giving the barest nod.
2007
Dungarvan
14 September, Friday
One of two Afrikaner doctors watching their team whitewash England (36-0) on TV in the Anchor was giving a running commentary and he came out with this gem in response to a close-up on Jason Robinson’s bloody face.
Efrika is a taff cantry, boys. No place for cissies.
2023
14 November, Tuesday
The first arresting part of My Traitor’s Heart (1990) begins on p. 86 with Malan’s adventures (as a young reporter) at the Blue Hotel, the police HQ in Witwatersrand. A special padded lift went from the basement garage straight to the tenth floor and the Security Police. Up there he takes tea with Colonels Coetzee and Swanepoel, the former writing a thesis on Trotsky, the latter being a torturer of international renown.
On p. 99 he is kneeling outside beside a broken black man newly arrived from the fifth floor “in a spray of glass” when he spots a shiny black boot and looks up at the top cop himself, Brigadier Visser, who explains the background.
Ja… this is the Bantu who was hitting people with an axe. He just dived out the window.
Malan spilt his tea in his lap when faced with the ranting of Col. Swanepoel but he feels ashamed of the sense of dread he feels whenever in Soweto, or any township, like it was a racist feeling, when it seems merely instinctive cop-on. See p. 96.
In my imagination, Soweto [was] a place where humble people barricaded their doors at darkness and trembled through the night while werewolves howled outside. It was not an entirely fanciful vision. Soweto was a charnel house. Its murder rate was four or five times higher than New York’s… On Friday nights… wolf packs of gangsters lay in wait for incoming trains, and picked off breadwinners on their way home… There was a drastic shortage of houses and schools… There were no cinemas, no bars, no hotels, no modern shopping centres… and no electricity. The place was a giant labour barracks, grimly utilitarian, and intentionally so.
18 November, Saturday
A Malan passage on p. 186 reminds me of the Palestinians and their righteous rage, e.g.
Somewhere out there, insanely brave black boys and men were ferrying guns from place to place, manufacturing petrol bombs, building barricades of tyres in the streets or setting fire to government buildings. They were no longer willing to settle for vokol, for ‘fuck-all’…
[In The Spectator in 2010, Malan contrasted the apartheid regime’s post-Cold-War handover of the reins, for better or worse, with the refusal of the Israelis to think ahead in a similar fashion: “They too were presented with a fleeting chance to make peace from a position of power, but… they dug in their heels, refusing to make the painful concessions necessary… Now they’re… totally reliant on the protection of a declining America…”]
19 November, Sunday
The “Hammerman” murders in Natal lead Malan into a long discussion of witchcraft and I haven’t quite got to the end of that yet but I imagine he’d have said something by now if he’d thought to link it in any way at all to the absence of electricity where the blacks lived.
He doesn’t reflect either on the mention of the Eighties explosion of witch-doctoring in Soweto on p. 274, even though, for reasons very much based in this world, he has described the place in horror-film terms on p. 96. How odd it is that he doesn’t connect the mumbo jumbo rise to the advent of the mayhem.
Anyway, as my father used to say about the rural superstitions and hallucinations over here,
Those things went out when the electric light came.
21 November, Tuesday
I’m two-thirds of the way through Malan. Anecdotally it’s sensational stuff but amidst all the mental wrangling, one unspoken question increasingly begs to be asked.
Has the white man really any business in Africa, apart from gawking at animals?
23 November, Thursday
At times Malan fails to join the dots or even forgets whole passages and points made earlier. I closed the book at p. 392 last night, on a page that contains the following passage, with emphasis added here.
It was there… the day it all started, back in September 1984, in the township of Sebokeng. The very first casualty of the great uprising was a black community councillor… hacked and burned to death by a black mob. After that, it grew and grew, until it equalled and ultimately eclipsed the white horror.
At worst here, he had some brass neck in pulling those two apart for comparison. Given so much of which he has already eloquently explored, in terms of both (a) (same page) “every martyr cut down by apartheid’s riot police” and (b) the living death inflicted in Gaza-like townships and scorched Bantustans for the sake of white Lebensraum, the “white horror” is the permanent context, the prime mover, the original sinfully bad idea.
Dr. John Flynn 