Rian Malan
When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time in the school library. All the cool kids were doing it. And by “it” I mean whatever was the opposite of what I happened to be doing. Which happened to be reading books about Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey. And I didn’t even have to Google that just now. I did though have to Google “depressed about time spent in libraries as a youth.”
For some reason that is unclear to me know, and was likely also unclear to me at the time, I decided that I would read all the books about each country that the school library had. While I did eventually manage to make it “through” Turkey -- largely due to the underwhelming number of books about Turkey that our school library had -- I didn’t make it out the Middle East section before graduation.
Since every bookstore near us has closed down I was recently forced to get (and promptly lost) a Pacifica library card, allowing me to revisit my geographic quest. The first books I checked out-- and then got fined a gazillion dollars for because I cannot return a library book on time to save my life -- were Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, and My Traitor’s Heart -- two books about two men that lived and worked in Africa a century apart, but who shared some remarkably similar experiences.
Both Henry Stanley and Rian Malan sought to find their place in Africa. Stanley was abandoned by his mother and by his entire family and forced to live in a Welsh workhouse at the age of six. He spent a good portion of his subsequent life trying to recreate an identity without that hid that difficult beginning from public. In doing so, he inadvertently helped to create an image that would stand him in the public eye as a man of cruelty, the bad cop to the more famous Livingstone’s good cop. Tim Jeal does an impressive job of documenting why Stanley doesn’t deserve the reputation he has and that he was, in fact, one the greatest explorers of Africa. I’m usually a footnote reader, but my knowledge of all things Africa are such that Jeal’s footnotes would have needed footnotes. And I think this was my only truck with Jeal’s book, that it seems to depend a little too heavily on the expectation that the reader has a certain amount of familiarity with the continent and that they hadn’t say, gotten bogged down in the Middle East section of the library during high school.
Stanley’s reputation for cruelty came in large part through his own reports about shooting Africans. Although the shootings were in self-defense they raised objections from those who had never had the occasion to experience the place where “once Africans had made overt threats of violence, they would treat as weakness any subsequent attempts to placate them.” Even though separated by a century, Rian Malan’s Africa turns out to be not that much different.
I first read an excerpt from Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart in an old Granta (Winter 1989) that I picked up for a couple of bucks at a thrift store that shall remain nameless because I am greedy selfish bastard and someday I plan to go back and buy up every available issue. Malan’s essay is a heartbreaking and inspiring story about Creina and Neil Alcock, a white South African couple that moves to Msinga, a district in the self-governing homeland of kwaZulu, that Malan describes as an “ecological Hiroshima.” The Alcocks don’t just live among the Africans though; they live like them as well, enduring rats, cold, heat, and tadpoles in their coffee (even amphibians need a little caffeine apparently). Their story isn’t movie neat – there is no clear resolution, no easy answers. But there is a love and a stubborn hope that has had me re-reading the story at least once a year, just to remember that people such as the Alcocks can exist.
Rian’s book does an excellent job of illustrating the soul crushing stone of apartheid and why it could not be easily be moved those, including Malan, who were against the system. But the same belief system of respect through violence that existed in Stanley’s era continued to apply. And because violence ruled, taking a stance against the system becomes dangerous. Simply taking a black African home was enough to cost some whites their lives.
The question then comes down to this: do you believe in equality to such an extent that you are willing to possibly risk your life and your loved ones by following that belief? I’d like to say yes. I’d like to think that I could be as brave as Creina and Neil Alcock, but I know what the answer is. Separated by thousands of miles and experience, and years, in the case of Stanley, it’s easy to say “not me,” but in truth, it is me. Which may explain why I reread Malan’s Msinga essay every so often, to remind myself that there are people whose answer to inequality is a resounding no, even at enormous personal cost to themselves. And that they were able to do so because they possessed something that could not be had from an entire arsenal of books.
