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Though a book of nonfiction – creative nonfiction, rather – it reads like a thriller.
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Title: The inheritors
Author: Eve Fairbanks
ISBN: 9781776192724
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
The inheritors: An intimate portrait of a brave and bewildered nation by American journalist Eve Fairbanks is a book of personalised histories told against the backdrop of a well-written synthesis of South African national history. Dipuo will be familiar as a struggle activist and mother of Malaika Mahlatsi, famous for the book Memoirs of a born free: Reflections on the rainbow nation. Mahlatsi used the nom de plume Malaika Wa Azania to publish another book titled Corridors of death: The struggle to exist in historical white institutions. Her growing-up story is told with those of her late mother Dipuo and Cristo, who is one of the last Afrikaners to be conscripted into the army.
Dipuo was a street committee political activist during the late eighties and early nineties. We see her living under the endless curfews in the confused township streets of Katlehong, a township in what is now the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, during the early nineties, mostly when the apartheid-sponsored black-on-black violence was at its peak. Much of what is told there – the business boycotts, necklacing (killing by placing a burning tyre around a victim’s neck), gun-toting streets and all – will be familiar to anyone, like myself, who grew up on the burning township streets.
We also follow Christo’s life from growing up on the farm of Oudtshoorn to military training and deployment on the streets of Katlehong. Together with Tembisa and Thokoza, Vosloorus is where the tragic story of IFP-led killings in mine hostels of those associated with the ANC liberation movement took place; these townships were then, literally, a war zone. To date, many still live with untreated psychological effects from the horrors of that epoch, and it is why most of us will never forgive Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was an apartheid collaborationist leader of the IFP. During the violent era of the late ’80s and early ’90s, rumours were rife that the apartheid regime was using foreign black operatives from Angola as killers and secret black operatives in the townships. According to Christo, who operated with them, this was no rumour, but a fact. We get to learn of the living, existential anxieties within the white South African world and those who feared the Swaart Gevaar, especially during the period of political transition to the reign of the ANC – the post-traumatic stress of former SADF operatives, and all.
From her books and usually long Facebook statuses, Malaika is what Walt Whitman would call someone with “sensitive cuticles” for being intensely affected by the world around them. Like most people who grow up under the veiled poverty of the township, she has not had an easy life. Books have been her saving grace, proving once more that one of the best ways of survival is telling each other stories. Because, once something is told in a story or written down, it is tamed to give us the means to live with or overcome it. Without undermining the gains of our freedom, her book Memoirs of a born free examines succinctly the failures of our current government in economic freedom, even for those born after the ’94 democratic political freedom.
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The book is refreshingly free of the stereotyping and superficial interpretations found in most works relying on historical synthesis, which do not use much source material.
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What The inheritors does well is to give a pithy political background to the individual experience of these characters. Though a book of nonfiction – creative nonfiction, rather – it reads like a thriller. I can imagine how informative it may be to those not familiar with that history, even as it feels a little too simplistic to those who experienced or studied it in depth. But it does manage to provide a good, intimate history of the era as a comprehensive introduction. The book is refreshingly free of the stereotyping and superficial interpretations found in most works relying on historical synthesis, which do not use much source material. I think it is saved from this by basing its learning on the oral testimony of lived and living history. As a historical novelist, I am fond of telling a historical story through individual and family dramas, as it provides a fresh perspective on things, so the book was up my alley.
From the life stories of three individuals, we hopscotch through South African history, allowing the past and the present to coexist uneasily, exposing very well the tensions of our status quo. Often, the book’s narrative is dreamlike, shifting together to form a unique depiction of how these lives “supped full of horror” to deliver the stillborn miracle of our so-called rainbow nation. Fairbanks often contrasts South African history with the USA’s. In a way, the histories of these countries have a quality of inverted similarities. In South Africa, the white settler minority reigned over the majority, while the inversion is true for the USA. Fairbanks calls the countries nations founded in myth and hope.
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This might be the way to defeat superfluous historical ideologies – by bringing things to the flawed messiness of personal experience.
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I loved, also, its subversive, ironic tone towards established apartheid narrative, providing a nuanced fontanelles of history which I also attempted in my book, The wanderers (if you would pardon my self-aggrandising). In this era of historical revisions by both white conservatives and radically woke activists who’re obsessed with trying to use history as another weapon of politics, perhaps this recalling of our lived experiences beyond mere ideologies is what will free us from these demagogues. Personal experience, no matter how subjective its interpretation may be, doesn’t lie on the factual level. This might be the way to defeat superfluous historical ideologies – by bringing things to the flawed messiness of personal experience. And, as Simon Sebag Montefiore says in his recent seminal book, The world: A family history:
The best medicine for the crimes of the past is to cast the brightest light upon them; and, once those crimes are beyond the reach of punishment, this illumination is the best redemption, the only one that counts.
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