Dry White Season

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.