My Traitor's Heart

"A brutal excavation of a white South African's conscience during the final days of apartheid."

"I like this book because it is an intensely moving story. Again, it is about a journalist and power. Rian Malan felt the injustice of apartheid when he was growing up and wanted to do something to change it. He was from a well-known Afrikaner family in South Africa, but instead of going into politics he became a journalist. I mentioned his book in a recent lecture to journalism students at City University [London] because Malan talks about the importance of the newspaper in fighting for justice. In South Africa it was often the last port of call for wronged people. They would turn up in the newspaper office, desperate to tell their story. They wanted people to bear witness to what had happened to them. Exactly. Newspapers played a very important role in campaigning against apartheid. That is why South Africa has very strong media laws today, in acknowledgement of how important the media was in fighting against the injustices of apartheid. I also like the book because it is an autobiography, and in covering the story of his life he also tells the story of South Africa. He doesn’t take anything as received knowledge but subjects it all to scrutiny and muses on what it means in terms of human nature."

"Rian Malan wrote this in the late 80s. He left South Africa, as he refused to be conscripted into the armed forces of the apartheid regime, and he went to live in the United States. He left as a crime reporter for The Star, which is a Johannesburg daily, and when he was in the US he became a narrative journalist and ended up a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. While he was in America he decided he was going to go back to South Africa and write the story of the Malans. “My Traitor’s Heart is perhaps the most important memoir that has ever been published by a white South African.” They are a very old Afrikaner family stretching right back to around 1687, I think, which was 35 years after Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape. There was a Malan at every great historical event in the ensuing 320 years. Rian was commissioned by Random House to go and write the story of the history of his clan, but he realised 100 pages in that the story was actually a memoir and it was about his struggle. Because, when he looked at the Malan family all the way up to his Great Uncle Daniel François Malan, who was the first apartheid era prime minister, I suppose he understood that the real story was about his own identity as a white South African. His father was Afrikaner and his mother is English-speaking, so he straddles two worlds in the memoir. He decided to tell the story of South Africa by describing how South Africans go about killing each other, and so he visited scenes of bloodshed and murder across the country. My Traitor’s Heart is perhaps the most important memoir that has ever been published by a white South African. When I read it for the first time in 2005, before my cousin was murdered, it had a profound effect on me. Here was a man whose identity is very close to mine, who stared into the irreconcilable inner turmoils that are implicit in being a white South African. I subsequently became friendly with Rian and he became a mentor."

"I’m very wary of the idea that one can read a book about one country in Africa and substitute it for another country. But I do think one of the more powerful books that has come out of the continent as a piece of literature in a long time was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart . He’s descended from the founders of apartheid. He’s from the Afrikaner family of the Malans who were involved in every stage of it. He is a really extraordinary writer, and he was writing, in late-apartheid South Africa, about killings by blacks of whites and by whites of blacks. A bit like police reporting, but also a memoir. It’s a hybrid form, grappling with what the violence tells us about the politics, and what the culture tells you about the violence. It goes deep, deep, deep into individual lives, which I increasingly have come to believe is the only way that we can understand these large, political shapes, particularly in stories that are foreign to us. It’s beautifully written and it’s extremely complex. It’s also highly personal. You don’t read it to get the information that you would get from the Economist Intelligence Unit. But you come away with this sense that something has been drawn absolutely out of the South African soul, the way you might read a Solzhenitsyn book to understand something about Russia."

"A brutal excavation of a white South African’s conscience during the final days of apartheid."

"a brutal excavation of a white South African's conscience at apartheid's end."