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fionayin's review against another edition
5.0
“I have never understood why Justice should be blind; she should be clear-eyed.”
“‘I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.’”
“‘I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.’”
gugsnbooks's review against another edition
4.0
We read this book in my book club and it was by far the most free-flowing, heated and emotionally charged session.
How could it not be, seeing as it tackles the issues and history so close to home. We could all imagine our parents and grandparents experiences the atrocities that occurred during Apartheid. This book is very relevant for South Africa today and reveals all the things that have lead us to the precarious place we are in.
Some of the content is difficult to stomach, but it is written very well. It is a brave book.
How could it not be, seeing as it tackles the issues and history so close to home. We could all imagine our parents and grandparents experiences the atrocities that occurred during Apartheid. This book is very relevant for South Africa today and reveals all the things that have lead us to the precarious place we are in.
Some of the content is difficult to stomach, but it is written very well. It is a brave book.
margaretefg's review against another edition
4.0
Ouch. Malan doesn't take the easy way to explaining SA history. He is clear about how race in SA is not equivalent to the US. He doesn't shy away from telling of his own racism or his family's. It's a complex, compelling book and another window into South Africa.
patkay85's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.75
daytonm's review against another edition
4.0
A powerful and difficult book, written shortly before the end of apartheid by a white South African who left the country for the US and then went back.
A mix of in-depth reporting and memoir, Malan's book shows a man who from a young age opposed his country's government and his fellow Boer's racism, but was also in many ways naive (his candid analysis of his younger self struck close to home). Later, as he reports on a range of political and apolitical (but always horrifically brutal) murders, people of all colors killing each other, Malan begins to doubt coexistence is possible. He believes the anti-apartheid cause is just but is anxious whether it can end in any way but slaughter, whether a white person can ever be home in Africa or whether it will always be us vs. them.
There is much I learned in this book (for example, I had not been familiar with the disturbing history of violence between rival anti-apartheid groups), and the book raises hugely important questions for white leftists/anti-racists. It doesn't answer many of these questions, and those answers he gives are not all correct or complete, but Malan writes movingly and in good faith, well worth grappling with.
A mix of in-depth reporting and memoir, Malan's book shows a man who from a young age opposed his country's government and his fellow Boer's racism, but was also in many ways naive (his candid analysis of his younger self struck close to home). Later, as he reports on a range of political and apolitical (but always horrifically brutal) murders, people of all colors killing each other, Malan begins to doubt coexistence is possible. He believes the anti-apartheid cause is just but is anxious whether it can end in any way but slaughter, whether a white person can ever be home in Africa or whether it will always be us vs. them.
There is much I learned in this book (for example, I had not been familiar with the disturbing history of violence between rival anti-apartheid groups), and the book raises hugely important questions for white leftists/anti-racists. It doesn't answer many of these questions, and those answers he gives are not all correct or complete, but Malan writes movingly and in good faith, well worth grappling with.
sincitylibrarian's review against another edition
4.0
Fantastic. Probably the best book I've read on South Africa...and I have read many! History, biting journalistic voice, and complex memoir. Really good.
t_bone's review against another edition
5.0
This book kicked me in the guts and it hurt. People do such horrible things to each other. Why can't we all just get along?
adeliyiannis's review against another edition
5.0
Horrifying and moving, this book will stay with me for a long time. A must-read.
justineferon's review against another edition
5.0
We’ve been in South Africa for 8 days, and I’ve spent much of that time absorbed in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart. This book – an account of apartheid written in 1990 by a journalist and former South African exile – has stirred something in me. Not just sadness, not just outrage, but a persistent and painful self-awareness.
I’ve always felt intellectually disturbed by but morally detached from America’s history of racial oppression. Since I came from Canada, since my roots were elsewhere, that seemed, to put it glibly, like someone else’s bad karma. But as a person of Dutch descent in a country where apartheid’s terrible crimes were committed largely by people with a similar history to mine, I don’t have that luxury. Throughout My Traitor’s Heart, Malan tells tales of brutality by South Africa’s white minority – stories of people who beat, burn, murder, and dehumanize others. The perpetrators in these tales are tall, fair, hardy, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked – they look like I do.
Malan, of course, has this problem to an even greater degree. He’s an Afrikaner, a Boer, the scion of a pro-apartheid family. And, as he writes, he initially intended this book to be something of a family history – an explanation of how a man raised to accept and perpetuate oppression could instead grow up to become a “kaffirboetie.” In the end, the book became something different – a testament to the pain, ugliness, and contradictions of modern South Africa. In it, Malan grapples with and tries to cure himself of his own engrained prejudices – “the poisonous fruit of racist conditioning.”
This isn’t a hopeful book – in it, Malan basically predicted a South African implosion that never came – and I’ve been struggling to derive any hopeful lesson from it. What I’ve learned, truthfully, is how complicit I am. I’m complicit at home in New York, where my comfortable life depends upon the labor of people who have never had the advantages I have. I’m complicit in all the places I travel, where tourism is both economic boon and exploitation. And, of course, I’m complicit here. So many times we’ve remarked upon how affordable things are in South Africa ("Can you believe this hotel was just $100?" "Wow, that dinner was just $60!”). But of course there’s a reason for that.
Malan has also obliterated the great comfort I took in classifying myself as liberal. He writes derisively of people who express all the right feelings and say all the right things but do nothing: “Since Dawid Malan’s time, white English- speaking liberals had been standing in the wings, wringing their hands, manicuring their delicate humanist principles, and asking blacks to be patient just a little while longer.” His words make me look back differently on these past few days, when I’ve been reading, rolling Malan’s ideas around in my head, then reciting passages aloud to my husband as we drive South Africa’s garden route. There’s something awful even in that, of discussing Malan’s crushing words while cruising blithely past townships on the road from one nice hotel to another.
It’s all damning, and Malan seems as paralyzed by it as I feel. He writes about “ja-nee,” a Boer phrase meaning “yes-no.” It’s the thing you say when it would be difficult or dangerous to fight, so you just cluck “ja-nee” and move on. This is a book filled with this kind of language. After recounting the story of a 14-year-old boy who was burned alive in Soweto, Malan ends by writing “so it goes.” He repeats the refrain “just one of those South African things” whenever there’s inexplicable violence or injustice.
For this reason, for so many reasons, My Traitor’s Heart is a book that will be difficult to shake off, and it seems I shouldn’t try. So I’ll dive into the next book instead, seeing what more I can learn about this country, and how perhaps I should live differently as a result.
I’ve always felt intellectually disturbed by but morally detached from America’s history of racial oppression. Since I came from Canada, since my roots were elsewhere, that seemed, to put it glibly, like someone else’s bad karma. But as a person of Dutch descent in a country where apartheid’s terrible crimes were committed largely by people with a similar history to mine, I don’t have that luxury. Throughout My Traitor’s Heart, Malan tells tales of brutality by South Africa’s white minority – stories of people who beat, burn, murder, and dehumanize others. The perpetrators in these tales are tall, fair, hardy, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked – they look like I do.
Malan, of course, has this problem to an even greater degree. He’s an Afrikaner, a Boer, the scion of a pro-apartheid family. And, as he writes, he initially intended this book to be something of a family history – an explanation of how a man raised to accept and perpetuate oppression could instead grow up to become a “kaffirboetie.” In the end, the book became something different – a testament to the pain, ugliness, and contradictions of modern South Africa. In it, Malan grapples with and tries to cure himself of his own engrained prejudices – “the poisonous fruit of racist conditioning.”
This isn’t a hopeful book – in it, Malan basically predicted a South African implosion that never came – and I’ve been struggling to derive any hopeful lesson from it. What I’ve learned, truthfully, is how complicit I am. I’m complicit at home in New York, where my comfortable life depends upon the labor of people who have never had the advantages I have. I’m complicit in all the places I travel, where tourism is both economic boon and exploitation. And, of course, I’m complicit here. So many times we’ve remarked upon how affordable things are in South Africa ("Can you believe this hotel was just $100?" "Wow, that dinner was just $60!”). But of course there’s a reason for that.
Malan has also obliterated the great comfort I took in classifying myself as liberal. He writes derisively of people who express all the right feelings and say all the right things but do nothing: “Since Dawid Malan’s time, white English- speaking liberals had been standing in the wings, wringing their hands, manicuring their delicate humanist principles, and asking blacks to be patient just a little while longer.” His words make me look back differently on these past few days, when I’ve been reading, rolling Malan’s ideas around in my head, then reciting passages aloud to my husband as we drive South Africa’s garden route. There’s something awful even in that, of discussing Malan’s crushing words while cruising blithely past townships on the road from one nice hotel to another.
It’s all damning, and Malan seems as paralyzed by it as I feel. He writes about “ja-nee,” a Boer phrase meaning “yes-no.” It’s the thing you say when it would be difficult or dangerous to fight, so you just cluck “ja-nee” and move on. This is a book filled with this kind of language. After recounting the story of a 14-year-old boy who was burned alive in Soweto, Malan ends by writing “so it goes.” He repeats the refrain “just one of those South African things” whenever there’s inexplicable violence or injustice.
For this reason, for so many reasons, My Traitor’s Heart is a book that will be difficult to shake off, and it seems I shouldn’t try. So I’ll dive into the next book instead, seeing what more I can learn about this country, and how perhaps I should live differently as a result.
smartipants8's review against another edition
5.0
My first trip to South Africa drew me to this book. What a beautiful and sad and scary country South Africa is. I felt that I could relate and understand the plight of the Africans who had been tortured during Apartheid but I struggled with how the fun intersting white South Africans I met could live with themselves. THis book helps explain it a little...