Reading Across South Africa

We’ve settled into Cape Town – found a great local coffee spot, toured Bo Kaap, browsed The Old Biscuit Mill, and visited the District 6 Museum. Now, with my husband fighting off food poisoning, today is the perfect day to stay close to home and dig in to my South Africa reading list.

Here’s how I decided what to bring with me on this trip:

Step 1: Read everyone else’s reading list

I’m not above learning from others and, hell, I love a good recommendation. Some lists I enjoyed include this one from The Culture Trip, one from TripSavvy, and this one from Buzz South Africa. Bottom line? Everyone recommends Mandela. Special shout-out to Mic for creating a list full of choices that were exactly what I was looking for – socially-conscious, urban-centric, and off-the-beaten-path. Two of the recommendations from that list made it onto mine.

Step 2: Begin with the basics before you go

About a month ago, I read Francis Wilson’s Dinosaurs, Diamonds, and Democracy, a short primer on South African history. The bits about fossils were a serious slog, but the effort was worth it to give me some much-needed context as I navigate this country.

Step 3: Get the balance right

Just as the best trips are eclectic – a mix of thinking, doing, learning, seeing, relaxing, sleeping, and eating – so too are the best reading lists. I try to mix fiction with non-fiction, choose both contemporary and historical writing, and balance local thinking with an outsider perspective. My list for this trip has one memoir, one novel, and one series of vignettes. It includes two South African writers and one Canadian of South African descent. And the books’ publication dates are 1990, 2006, and 2017, allowing me to trace the arc of this country over time.

Step 4: Leave room for magic

I chose just three books – enough to fill my time if I ration my reading, but not so many that I can’t add something (or, more realistically, several things) that speak to me at one of the bookstores I plan to hit on this trip.

So, what did I choose?

My Traitor’s Heart / Rian Malan

I’ve already started this one – the memoir of a man trying to grapple with his family’s history of advancing apartheid - and so far I’ve been moved, disturbed, and fascinated by Malan’s effort, prone to recounting its every detail to my husband.

Portrait With Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked / Ivan Vladislavic

Portrait with Keys is a compilation of 138 passages about a city that The Guardian describes this way:

“Johannesburg is a vast, riverless metropolis without icons, which has shambled through its short history fateful but ungainly, and emerged from the miseries of apartheid into a condition of more or less perpetual criminal siege. Padlocks and keys, security guards, guns, muggers, barricades and shutters - these are its predominant civic images.”

According to several reviews, Vladislavic manages to highlight the beauty and humanity in this much-maligned city without glossing over what makes it so challenging. Given that I’ll be spending four days in Joburg, here’s hoping his experience colors mine.

Hum If You Don’t Know The Words / Bianca Marais

Hum If You Don’t Know The Words is Bianca Marais’ debut novel, and I chose it for several reasons. First, Marais and I have something in common – she graduated from the same University of Toronto writing program that I attended. Second, I’ve always had a soft spot for good-looking covers and cleverly-titled books; this has both. And, finally, it was released just this summer. Really looking forward to this one.