MY TRAITOR'S HEART
Rian Malan
349 pp., Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.
$19.95
There are no hard-and-fast rules as to whether apostasy will bring happiness or anguish in its wake. Either result may obtain. Happy is the apostate who, upon rejecting the falsehoods of his past, discovers new truths upon which to structure his life. People will rightly call him fortunate. Although his beliefs may cause him to suffer persecution, they will bolster his courage and grace him with tranquility. Another man will apostatize without felicity. He, too, will abjure his falsehoods, but only to find himself in a moral quagmire where neither truth nor a path of righteousness is discernible. Sorely afflicted, he will know the spiritual darkness of a personal Gethsemane.
Though bereft of comfort, the anguished apostate may yet act honorably by bearing respectful witness to his grief. That is the achievement of young Afrikaner writer, Rian Malan, in My Traitor's heart, his first book and remorselessly probing examination of contemporary South Africa. Even as the South African morality play appeals to a universal yearning for clear choices between good and evil, Malan describes a maddening situation where simple rectitude, let alone heroism, is impossible because there are no certainties, moral or otherwise. He excoriates apartheid but strongly suspects that a post apartheid South Africa will be no less repugnant. Cogently, eschewing any false optimism, he offers an admonition to all who harbor bright expectations of the beneficence of majority rule.
Agonizing uncertainty
We must doubt, as Malan himself doubts, whether he ever was a real Afrikaner. Not even during childhood did the white culture of his birth and upbringing claim his loyalty. He felt alienated by the Afrikaners' Calvinist religion, was unable to summon enthusiasm for children's games celebrating his Boer heritage, and, especially, felt uneasy with Afrikaner racial attitudes. In fact, he never became sufficiently acculturated to Afrikaner values that he could, though cultural apostasy, disown them. His apostasy is of an altogether different and more serious nature.
While still a teenager, Malan embraced the values of the European Enlightenment; namely “the Jacobin doctrine of liberty, equality, and fraternity, …Rousseau's concept of the Noble Savage, and…the civilized reinterpretation of the Scripture upon which all of this was based.” These are the values against which Malan turns an apostate's treason. His least-guarded statement appears in reaction to the grisly murder of thirty-two black alleged sorceresses - they were “hurled alive into pits of flame” - by other blacks supporters of Bishop Desmond Tutu's “nonviolent” United Democratic Front. Enraged at the scant coverage afforded this story by the press, Malan is tempted to “tear out the throat of the nearest enlightened white man.”
Malan does not unequivocally reject Enlightenment values. After all, he is not a happy apostate, the sort of fellow who can smoothly change his moral certainties. Malan suffers agonizing uncertainty. Shortly after posing a threat to the nearest enlightened white man, he writes approvingly of the “doctrine of the brotherhood of man, which
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