"My Traitor's Heart"

The family Malan has held a place of prominence in Afrikaner history since the very beginning. Dawid Malan was one of the first Europeans to set foot outside “white” Africa (north of the Great Fish river), as he fled persecution with his black mistress. (Later, oddly, he resurfaced as a vocal proponent of Afrikaner supremacy over the blacks). D.F. Malan, as leader of the National Party when it came to power in 1948, was the first president of apartheid South Africa. General Magnus Malan was Head of the Defense Force, and later Minister of defense in the 1970s.

For a liberal, anti-apartheid journalist named Rian Malan, therefore, reconciling family history with a proud personal ideology was bound to cause some anguish and confusion. He wrestled with the contradiction for three decades before “running away” to the United States. Malan's book, “My Traitor's Heart," which he wrote on his return eight years later, is a more vivid journey into the depths of a conflicted soul and a tormented country than I could have thought possible of any such attempt to understand...well I'm not sure what he sought to understand. Apartheid, perhaps, or maybe just himself.

Malan “loved” blacks, having grown up with them all his life, but he was reduced to paranoia every time he stepped into a township. He introduces friends more radically liberal than he, who were desperate to be black, to escape their whiteness, but unwilling to pick up a black hitchhiker with no legs, or stand on the black side of the divide during confrontations with the police. Most poignantly, though, he describes fear. Fear of the blacks he loves.

“My Traitor's Heart” left two impressions on me. The first is that Apartheid can in fact be understood. Which is a slightly uncomfortable realization, actually. It's easy enough to skim the surface of the issue by simply imagining a racist Afrikaner society that justified its ruthless suppression by means of some hopelessly blinkered and backward worldview. It's more difficult to question who I would have been, how I would have acted, and how I would have truly felt (empathetic to the core? I seriously doubt it) in such a place at such a time.

The second impression was that, whereas in its essence, every day impacts and political implications Apartheid may have been merely depraved, at the margins (and who knows how thick these were?) it was severely, nauseously fucked up. It was murder, torture, hatred and fear. Blacks victimized by whites (government as well as by truly racist individuals); whites victimized by blacks (much of Malan's fear came from the fact that, when you were on the black turf of the townships, or asleep in your bed, it made no difference if you had fought apartheid all your life, you were marked by your whiteness); whites by whites (estrangement, imprisonment and in some cases death greeted the regime's most committed white opponents); and, resulting in the greatest death toll of all, blacks by blacks in never ending warfare between ethnic tribes and political groups. The stories that Malan tells, dug up through years of journalistic investigation, are appalling.

For the vast majority of South Africans, then, to live during apartheid was to live with your head buried very, very deeply in the sand. As Germans must have done during the Nazi regime. As the UN Security Council did during the Rwanda genocide in 1994. As it does today during another genocide in Sudan. As I have always done with regard to the treatment of First Nations people in Canada. To live in our world is to live shuttered and isolated (or, for a lucky few, insulated) lives - we are neither omnipresent, nor omnipotent, after all - and it seems to me that it is fortune alone that dictates the consequences of our ignorance and inaction. As a Canadian I ignore poverty, abuse and discrimination everyday. If I was living in Germany in the 1930's and 40's (blond and blue-eyed) I probably would have ignored the Holocaust.

I have no idea what it means to be an Afrikaner in South Africa today (or elsewhere for that matter), but Malan brought me a little closer to understanding their past as well as their present I think. And despite the rather somber topic it's a beautiful book that I highly recommend. If anyone is looking for a good read these days :)