My Traitor's Heart
We’ve been in South Africa for 8 days, and I’ve spent much of that time absorbed in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart. This book – an account of apartheid written in 1990 by a journalist and former South African exile – has stirred something in me. Not just sadness, not just outrage, but a persistent and painful self-awareness.
I’ve always felt intellectually disturbed by but morally detached from America’s history of racial oppression. Since I came from Canada, since my roots were elsewhere, that seemed, to put it glibly, like someone else’s bad karma. But as a person of Dutch descent in a country where apartheid’s terrible crimes were committed largely by people with a similar history to mine, I don’t have that luxury. Throughout My Traitor’s Heart, Malan tells tales of brutality by South Africa’s white minority – stories of people who beat, burn, murder, and dehumanize others. The perpetrators in these tales are tall, fair, hardy, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked – they look like I do.
Malan, of course, has this problem to an even greater degree. He’s an Afrikaner, a Boer, the scion of a pro-apartheid family. And, as he writes, he initially intended this book to be something of a family history – an explanation of how a man raised to accept and perpetuate oppression could instead grow up to become a “kaffirboetie.” In the end, the book became something different – a testament to the pain, ugliness, and contradictions of modern South Africa. In it, Malan grapples with and tries to cure himself of his own engrained prejudices – “the poisonous fruit of racist conditioning.” For instance, he resolves to pick up every black hitchhiker he sees:
“At the outset, I’d fall into a near psychosis of fear whenever I saw a knot of black travelers on the road up ahead. I’d study their clothes and belongings for clues as to who they might be, search, their eyes to see whether they were dangerous. Two times out of three, I’d conclude they were, but I’d stop anyway. Then the doors would slam and I’d pull off, and the man in the passenger seat would turn to me and say something like “What kind of white are you, you stop for blacks?” or “God has sent you to help us.” At such moments, I was stricken with remorse, to think I had harbored such ugly suspicions.
Sometimes it was even worse. Sometimes the hitchhikers didn’t come at all and when I turned and looked back I saw heels disappearing into the bush at the roadside, or frightened eyes watching me from behind a distant tree. I was white, they were black, and this was a lonely road. They thought I was going to shoot or rape them. I began to understand something quite important about South Africa: my fear of blacks was obscuring my understanding of the fear blacks felt for me.”
This isn’t a hopeful book – in it, Malan basically predicted a South African implosion that never came – and I’ve been struggling to derive any hopeful lesson from it. What I’ve learned, truthfully, is how complicit I am. I’m complicit at home in New York, where my comfortable life depends upon the labor of people who have never had the advantages I have. I’m complicit in all the places I travel, where tourism is both economic boon and exploitation. And, of course, I’m complicit here. So many times we’ve remarked upon how affordable things are in South Africa ("Can you believe this hotel was just $100?" "Wow, that dinner was just $60!”). But of course there’s a reason for that.
Malan has also obliterated the great comfort I took in classifying myself as liberal. He writes derisively of people who express all the right feelings and say all the right things but do nothing: “Since Dawid Malan’s time, white English- speaking liberals had been standing in the wings, wringing their hands, manicuring their delicate humanist principles, and asking blacks to be patient just a little while longer.” His words make me look back differently on these past few days, when I’ve been reading, rolling Malan’s ideas around in my head, then reciting passages aloud to my husband as we drive South Africa’s garden route. There’s something awful even in that, of discussing Malan’s crushing words while cruising blithely past townships on the road from one nice hotel to another.
It’s all damning, and Malan seems as paralyzed by it as I feel. He writes about “ja-nee,” a Boer phrase meaning “yes-no.” It’s the thing you say when it would be difficult or dangerous to fight, so you just cluck “ja-nee” and move on. This is a book filled with this kind of language. After recounting the story of a 14-year-old boy who was burned alive in Soweto, Malan ends by writing “so it goes.” He repeats the refrain “just one of those South African things” whenever there’s inexplicable violence or injustice.
For this reason, for so many reasons, My Traitor’s Heart is a book that will be difficult to shake off, and it seems I shouldn’t try. So I’ll dive into the next book instead, seeing what more I can learn about this country, and how perhaps I should live differently as a result.