The Will to Die

"Again, I highly recommend this. Can Themba was a writer on Drum magazine, which was the great magazine with a largely black readership in the early days of apartheid. Can was a friend of my dad’s. It sounds weird, but there’s almost a nostalgia for apartheid, reading it, because all the stories are set in the townships – Soweto, principally. So the backdrop is apartheid, but again they’re not political stories. There’s a wonderful story called ‘The Suit’. It’s about a guy who works very hard, and has a long walk to work. One day he forgets something so he goes back to find his wife in bed, and the back window’s open, and there’s a beautiful suit lying on a chair with the window swinging open. He doesn’t say anything except: ‘We have a guest. And that guest will take a meal, and you will lay the table for our guest and put food on his plate.’ And he goes on and on and on, and one day he comes home and his wife is dead in the bed, wrapped up in the suit. And that’s the end of the story. It’s just a story about jealousy. In fact, a friend of mine adapted it to make a short film set in London. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are just brilliant little character studies against a backdrop of apartheid. The Will to Die is a great misnomer – a lot of it is very funny and slightly surreal. I just found the stories very inspiring and uplifting. They’re all about people struggling against what feels like a crushing inevitability in the air around them, and that is sort of the African condition. Wherever you go today in the Congo, you will find monstrous warlords. But you will find far more volunteer nurses and Red Cross workers and teachers who haven’t been paid for 20 years but are still doing their job, not allowing things to fall apart. And that’s the takeaway theme from all of this."