remained essentially the same.IfDawid Malan had a disease ofthe soul, then Rian Malan had it too. I have always been two people, you see — a just White man, appalled by apartheid and the cruelties committed in its name,and an Afrikaner with a dis ease ofthe soul." Whatexactly Malan means by a"disease ofthe soul"is never clearly explained, and it is, if you'll excuse the extended metaphor, the flaw that plagues the book throughout. There are attempts to explain the paradox of his exist ence: "Iran becauseIwouldn'tcarry a gunforapartheid, and because I wouldn't carry a gun against it. Iran away becauseIhated Afrikaners and loved Blacks.I ran away because I was an Afrikaner andfeared Blacks." But again the clever play on words offers only a partial explanation. If Malan's sense ofguilt for having lived on the back of an oppressed majority was eased by his eight years in the United States, it was very soon replaced by an in tense longing for home and afeeling ofhaving betrayed hisAfrikanerdom.He portrays himselfas Judas Iscariot, feeding the ignorant American public with lies so that they might re-affirm their own self-righteousness and condemn a white South African, which they do not un derstand and which does not answer the charge brought against it. To demonstrate this, Malan recalls being in vited to a dinner party where the guests discussed the inflammatory statements they had seen Pik Botha mak ing on television. He describes the scene as follows: "Between coursesour hostasked,'What's wrong with that man?'And I rose to singfor my supper. They thought the struggle was a replay oftheir own Civil Rights movement,and who wasIto disillusion them? I said the easy and obvious things, the things they expected to hear. By the time I was done, they were shaking their heads knowingly over White South Afri ca's racist backwardness,andIwas counting my sil ver. My thirty pieces ofsilver." Malan obviously considers his betrayal in biblical terms, and his actions an unforgivable sin. Atthis pointin the book,Ican't help asking myselfwhere the author is heading. He claims to reject apartheid as evil and unjust.He has also rejected white liberalism as a spent force. He will notjoin the struggle of the leftwing; and now he seems to be suggesting that he is a Judas selling out an innocent white South Africa which he appears to both love and hate. It appears the Judas-like self-hate renders the author in capable ofselecting a course ofaction,or indeed to say anything tangible about his quandry.I shall examine the way heconcludesthe book and what his intentions were, before I make my ownjudgement. Even at the end of the book, Malan is no nearer to re solving his personal dilemma.Instead, he leaves us ex pectantly swimming in a mixture of hope and helpless ness by recounting the story ofNeil Alcock,the famous liberal and campaignerforjustice.He deals chiefly with Alcock's work in the Msinga area of KwaZulu and the hardships he experiences. The abuses he suffered at the hands of blacks and whites would have been enough to convince any mere mortal that race relations was a lost cause. But this is how Malan describes Alcock's atti tude: "You had to live among Africans, like an African, until you saw through African eyes, until African problems became your own problems." Malan quotes Breyten Breytenbach as follows: "We must give ourselves into the arms ofthe great African mother and trust she will not drop us." Once again we are confronted with aSouth African writ er's seductive ambiguity that escapes meaning.Who,or what is the 'great African mother'? And what does it mean to be an African in the last decade? Malan seems to believe that we should do what Alcock did. He gave all of himself to Africa, holding nothing back. He un derstood that he could not detach himself as another domineering white man driven by pity. The fact that an author seems unable to resolve his para dox does not detract from the book's worth. Malan's purging of the soul and breast-beating will reduce the book's merit if that is its only function. But if the book stands as an independent unit with a message then it is of value. The controversial author Salmon Rushdie says in his foreword thatthe authorintended achronicle ofhisfam ily history butended up admitting the atrocity hidden in his own traitorous heart. To his credit, Malan does not attempt immortality by glorifying himself as afreedom fighter or by painting a terrible picture of himself as a premeditative villain. It is his indecisiveness and endless sense ofguilt thatforces him to lay himself bare in public and leave him desper ate for absolution. Injudging the book,I return to the title. Is Riaan Malan guilty as charged? Does he have a "traitor's heart"? To the Afrikaner he might be a traitor, but he is not a traitor to me. My admiration for him stems from the way he tries to put his principles into action in a world which demands that its heroes must win,or die. Ultimately he asks the question all South Africans have asked:"How far am I prepared to go in fighting an unjust cause?" I concluded that Malan deserves a place amongstSouth Africa's best dissident writers."My Traitor's Heart"is a book ofmerit and a powerful example of anti-apartheid Afrikaans literature. I would like to close with an extractfrom an article that Riaan Malan wrote for Fair Lady magazine,which sup ports the view that"My Traitor's Heart" was written as a means ofexpunging guilt: "Never again willI be called upon to stick knitting needles in my eyes in an orgy ofguilt-stricken selfflagellation over, say, what the Boers did to Steve Biko." "Everything was ourfault, and had been since the day I was born. Come April 28(1994), that will cease to be the case." BIBLIOGRAPHY i) Riaan Malan, My Traitor's Heart, Vintage Books, London 1991 ii) Andre Brink,An Act ofTerror, Minerva Fiction, London 1993 iii) Jack Cope, The Adversary Within : dissident writers in Afrikaans,David Philip Publisher,Cape Town 1982 iv) Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Faber and Faber Ltd,London 1984 v) Riaan Malan,"Going Fishing",Fair Lady,6April 1994. 58 Kearsney Chronicle 1994
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