SOUTH AFRICA: BOOKS AND MOVIES

Before I continue with more posts about what we SAW in South Africa, I want to post about what I READ about the country. There is an awful lot of reading to do if you are interested in what's been written about South Africa and/or by South Africans.  These books I read in the last few months are just the tip of the iceberg.

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A good place to start reading about South Africa is The Covenant by James Michener.  This historical novel covers 500 years and the lineage of three families whose lives are intertwined: one native African, one Afrikaaner-Dutch, and one British. Michener gives a very good overview of South Africa's complex history. However, that complexity and detail leads to the biggest problem I have with this book, which is the same problem I've had with other Michener books--the brutal length. It's anywhere from 829 to 1200 pages long, depending on which size of type you get. I chose the audible version, which is 58 hours and 10 minutes long. I think that is the LONGEST book I have ever listened to, and I confess--I listened to it a 1.5x speed.    The.    Narrator.    Reads.    It.    So.    Slowly.    Even at that speed, it is like listening to FOUR normal-length books.   

I especially enjoyed the parts that included historical figures I had heard of, including Paul Kruger and Cecil Rhodes. Sadly, there is no mention of Nelson Mandela, who was sitting in prison during the period this book was written and had not yet become world famous. Published in 1980, the book ends while apartheid still had a strangle-hold on the nation. I wonder what Michener would have made of the human rights movements that led to the dismantling of apartheid more than a decade later.

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If Nelson Mandela is your hero, as he is mine, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela is a must. This is also quite a long book--684 pages for the version I read. I took me the better part of our trip, but it was worth it. I especially like this quote from the forward, written by President Bill Clinton:

"Tell me the truth. When you were leaving prison after twenty-seven years and walking down that road to freedom, didn't you hate them all over again?" and he said, "Absolutely I did, because they'd imprisoned me for so long. I was abused. I didn't get to see my children grow up. I lost my marriage and the best years of my life. I was angry. And I was afraid, because I had not been free in so long. But as I got closer to the car that would take me away, I realized that when I went through that gate, if I still hated them, they would still have me. I wanted to be free. And so I let it go."

In a nutshell, that is who Nelson Mandela is. The book tells you how he became that person.

I loved learning about Mandela's Xhosa childhood and the steps he took to become a lawyer in Johannesburg. He covers at length his entry into politics and the anti-apartheid movement. He throws out a lot of names that are unknown to me and hard to keep track of, and that gets a little tedious, but those people are an important part of the story. The narrative covering his 27 years in prison is fascinating, particularly as he works through the emotional and psychological aspects of being behind bars that long. I am struck by how he befriended other prisoners and many of the guards. And of course, the last sections about his release and the building of a new government are very interesting.

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Trevor Noah, these days a popular popular host on The Daily Show, was born in 1984 in South Africa to a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father during apartheid when it interracial sexual relations were illegal. During his childhood, he was not allowed to play outside or to go to school for fear that his mixed race background would result in a serious punishment for his mother. (His father stayed in South Africa but was not a huge part of his life.) Even after the end of apartheid when Trevor was 10, race relations were very unstable and it took years for him to figure out his place in society.  In spite of these significant obstacles, the life the author describes is mostly one filled with love and adventure. There is no bitterness, just a healthy honesty and quite a bit of humor as he looks back at the years that were the foundation of his current life.

This story was of particular interest to us because our guide Ryan was also of mixed heritage. His father was white and his mother was mixed race, or "coloured." Unlike Trevor Noah's parents, however, Ryan's parents married during the height of apartheid, which would have been very hard.

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We saw and loved the movie Invictus when it came out in 2009. It is the true story of  how newly-elected president Nelson Mandela used rugby to unite South Africa shortly after the end of apartheid.  South Africa was set to host the rugby World Cup in 1995, just a year after Mandela became president. Black South Africa hated the Springboks, their national team, a symbol to them of white elitism and repression. They typically cheered for whoever the Springboks' opponent was. Mandela befriends the team captain (who is white, of course) and starts rallying the country to join him in support of the team. One miracle leads to another, and South Africa wins the rugby World Cup--at home--that year. It's a cheering, sobbing, leaping-out-of-your-seat kind of a movie.

And the amazing thing is that Hollywood pretty much stuck to the actual story, which was told in the book Playing the Enemy, written by John Carlin and published in 2008. This is one of the times when the movie really does stick to the facts. If you've seen and loved the movie, you should definitely read the book.

Wow, that Mandela. He was something else. What a man.

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When I was a junior in high school, before I even dreamed of traveling to South Africa, I read and fell in love with Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.  Since then I have reread it three or four times, even using it as a text for a couple of semesters in the English classes I taught. It has a spot in my Top Ten Favorite Books of All Time.  Published in 1948 and set in the late 1940s, it is the story of a Zulu priest named Stephen Kumalo who leaves his village to search for his sister, his brother, and his son, all of whom are living (and struggling) in Johannesburg. His son Absalom, unfortunately, is on trial for murdering a white man. Over the course of the trial, Kumalo and James Jarvis, the father of the victim, become friends. Grieving the loss of their sons, they find some redemption in reaching out to each other.

Here is my favorite quote from the book, words spoken by Jarvis to Kumalo:

"Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. . . . I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfumdisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering."

Interestingly, Alan Paton and Nelson Mandela were friends, and Paton campaigned tirelessly for Mandela's release from prison.

                      

If you love the book as much as I do, or even if you have never read the book, the movie version starring James Earl Jones as Kumalo and Richard Harris as Jarvis is well worth your time.  It came out in 1995, just a year after the collapse of apartheid, making its message that much more poignant. It's one of those rare instances (along with the movie about Mandela and the rugby World Cup) when the movie does the book justice.

The score of the movie is worth mentioning. It was composed by John Barry (who also wrote the scores for Out of Africa, Dances with Wolves, a whole bunch of James Bond movies, and lots of others), who dedicated it to Nelson Mandela.

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I read The Power of One by Australian author Bryce Courtenay about ten years ago. It tells the story of an English boy named Peekay, born in 1939 in deeply divided South Africa. Peekay, ironically, is the victim of much abuse, and eventually establishes himself as a premiere boxer. The author does an excellent job of examining racial and cultural issues, especially the struggles among the native Africans, Afrikaners, and English settlers. In addition, his insights into South African nationalism helped me understand later issues (after the end of the book) related to apartheid and Mandela.

I must confess that I did get really tired of the boxing scenes. That's a sport that I just can't get into. I also hated the end, in which Peekay finally gets revenge on a man who tormented him when he was just five years old.  In the end it was a story about retribution rather than redemption--a stark contrast to Nelson Mandela's story.

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Finally, when I learned that two South Africans had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, I decided I had to read at least one book by each of them.

The first South African winner was Nadine Gordimer, who received the prize in 1991. Gordimer, who died in 2014, was a white woman who was active in anti-apartheid and HIV/AIDS causes. One of her books, The Conservationist, won the Man Booker Prize for literature in 1974.

I chose to read July's People, published in 1981. In it, Gordimer writes of an imagined post-apartheid South Africa in which a wealthy, white, educated family escapes Johannesburg, a city engulfed in a bloody civil war, by fleeing to the home of their former male servant, July, in a small village. The complex relationships between white and black, master and servant, get turned upside down, and the results are very thought-provoking.


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The second Nobel Prize for Literature winner, J. M. Coetzee, received the award in 2003. J. M. Coetzee was born in 1940 to Afrikaner parents. He grew up in Cape Town, attending the University of Cape Town, and after living in England and the United States for a period of time, he returned to his alma mater to teach literature.

I chose Life & Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize in 1983.  It tells the story of a poor, uneducated colored man with a cleft lip who has spent much of his life in institutions until he decides to take his dying mother back to the place where she was born. When she dies en route, he determines to nevertheless deliver her ashes to the farm where she grew up. He has many pretty depressing misadventures along the way that underscore his low status and seeming worthlessness to society, but he continues on and finds a kind of personal meaning to his life that is rooted in his love of gardening.

While not really a book specifically about South Africa--it could have taken place almost anywhere where handicapped people are treated as substandard humans--it offers some insights into some of the attitudes that gave rise to apartheid.

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After having loved Cry, the Beloved Country for so many years, I decided it was time to explore another book by Alan Paton. I chose Tales from a Troubled Land, a series of short stories, really just vignettes, that give the reader a peak into the many different ramifications of apartheid and colonial rule in South Africa. Paton, a white anti-apartheid activist, describes very deep divisions that seem irreconcilable. About half the stories are set in a reformatory and draw from Paton's own experiences as a principal at a reformatory. Perhaps why the plots and conflicts feel so real.