This is the story of an Afrikaner called Ben du Toit, a schoolteacher living
an outwardly happy life with a wife and two children.
Ben comes from a very poor rural background, and is through his life
someone who is quiet and reserved, described as never being a ringleader,
apart from a minor ruction at University when his sense of justice is
offended. He marries Susan, the daughter of an unimportant Afrikaans MP,
who has “great determination but not enough talent to really reach the
top”. Ben has talent but little ambition, and Susan comes to the conclusion
quite early on that she is married to a loser.
Ben lives a comfortable suburban life and is never put in the position of
questioning the core values of South African society. His apolitical
existence starts to change when a cleaner at his school, Gordon, asks for
help in investigating the death of his son Jonathan at the hands of the
security services. It is not long before Gordon himself is killed and Ben is
thrown into an investigation that will progressively alienate him from his
social milieu and even from his own family. Helped by Stanley, a black taxi
driver and activist, and Melanie, a journalist working for English-language
and British newspapers, Ben unveils the crimes and brutality of the Secret
Police. He becomes a frequent visitor to Soweto, where he comes into
contact with a life far removed from his own, privileged existence.
He starts by believing that he needs only to have a word with the
authorities, “a brief conversation to correct a misunderstanding. For what
else could it be but a regrettable, reparable mistake?” But in the end he
loses his wife and his job, and perhaps the worst betrayal, one of his
daughters has informed on him to the security police. Melanie is forced to
leave the country. Ben knows his records are in danger of being lost to the
security services, so he leaves them with an unnamed narrator, who then
pieces the story together when Ben is killed in a hit-and-run. The narrator
knows that he will become a target of the forces that killed Ben. But he
says at the very end of the book “Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I
am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I
know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew
nothing about it.”
One of the main threads for me in the book is the systemized violence of
the security services. I found a paragraph in a book called The Lion Sleeps
Tonight by Rian Malan, an Afrikaans journalist, as follows:
“In apartheid South Africa, the violence of ‘the system’ was almost always
systematic – every bullet had to be accounted for, and every corpse
subjected to a postmortem, followed by an inquest at which the police
would put forth fatuous explanations which were duly ridiculed in
editorials, lampooned in cartoons, raised in parliament by Helen Suzman,
picked up by the foreign press for worldwide amplification, and ultimately
synthesized into novels and plays and Hollywood epics of A Dry White
Season variety”.
It was this same systematic adherence to the legal requirements as they
were implemented under those systems, that led to the revelations of the
Stasi records as wonderfully portrayed in The Lives of Others. Shades of
1984 as well.
Whether any of us has been in a position when we felt powerless to act
because the forces arrayed against us are just too strong I can’t say. But
Melanie’s father, Professor Bruwer says: “there are only two kinds of
madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do
everything. The other is the belief we can do nothing.” Ben has a revealing
conversation with the unknown narrator early on in his married life, when
he says that he “has the feeling that deep inside every man there is
something he is ‘meant’ to do.” (Page 29) (John’s brick-in-the-wall theory).
In summary, a black, rather depressing novel, with the terrible inevitability
of the end, but wonderfully written, with well-developed characters.