| Description |
349 pages ; 24 cm |
| Summary |
Rian Malan is an Afrikaner, scion of a clan that settled South Africa over three hundred years ago and blood relative of the architect of apartheid. Raised in the comfortable, westernized white suburbs, Malan pictured himself a Just White Man, but he was, in fact, far removed from the horrors of his country. He then became a crime reporter on a Johannesburg daily. His beat was the front line in an undeclared civil war, and each day he came face to face with atrocities and terrors he had never imagined. Finally he quit his job and fled his country, spending eight years in uneasy exile. This book is the searing account of his return. Malan sets out to seek answers not in the way black and white South Africans live, but from the way they die at one another's hands. He reports stories of extremism--of murder and violence--that shed a sharp and piercing light on South Africa's racial quandary. These tales come part of a compelling narrative that takes us back to the roots of the white South African psyche, into the zone of howling ambiguities and swirling racist phantasms. In a country where race is destiny, can a white man ever change sides? Can he ever escape from the psychic armed camp into which he was born? In a place where men of different races are dumb in each other's tongues and blind in each other's cultures, there are no comforting answers to such questions. This book is an astonishing work of literary nonfiction--beautiful, horrifying, profound. In one sense it is a compendium of murder stories that carry the reader into the darkest heart of South Africa's racial nightmare. In another it is a pilgrim's progress, an account of one man's search for the truth about himself. It is a tale that begins in darkness and gropes its way toward the light because in the end, as a friend tells the author, "It's not the outside things that deform you, it's the choices you make. The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of total, obliterating darkness."--Adapted from dust jacket |
| Analysis |
South Africa Social conditions |
| Notes |
"A Morgan Entrekin book." |
| Subject |
Malan, Rian -- Family.
|
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Malan, Rian.
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| SUBJECT |
Malan, Rian http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n87920438 -- Family.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh00005743
|
| Subject |
Malan family.
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Exiles -- South Africa -- Biography.
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Huguenots -- South Africa -- Biography.
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Huguenots -- South Africa -- Genealogy.
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| SUBJECT |
South Africa http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125452 -- Biography.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99001237
|
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South Africa http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125452 -- Biography.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99004833
|
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South Africa http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125452 -- Exiles -- Biography
|
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South Africa -- Social conditions http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125495 -- 1961-
|
| Genre/Form |
Autobiographies.
|
| LC no. |
89015169 |
| ISBN |
087113229X |
|
