Review: Archie Henderson
Afrikaner Sondebok? Die Lewe van Hans van Rensburg Ossewagbrandwagleier, by Albert Blake (Jonathan Ball)
Hans van Rensburg is one of the most tragic figures of South African history in a country that is full of them. And he was also one of the most mysterious.
The title sondebok means scapegoat.
Over the past 80 years or so, Van Rensburg has not had a good press; now he gets a sympathetic hearing. Blake’s book is no hagiography, but the author goes the extra mile in attempting to understand this strange man, what motivated him and how he escaped justice.
At the height of his popularity – the war years of 1939 to 1945 – Van Rensburg led what was the most popular grouping of white people in South Africa at the time. The Ossewabrandwag (Oxwagon Sentinels) grew from the rise of Afrikaner nationalism around the time of the centenary of the Groot Trek. In 1938 there was a bitterness among many Afrikaners against anything British or English and strong generational trauma stemming from the Boer War that had deprived them of their two republics and plunged many into poverty. Continue reading
South Africa-reared Peter Hain, in his efforts to fight apartheid by campaigning against South African international rugby and cricket tours, became known here as “public enemy number one” and in the UK as “Hain the pain”. But he and those who campaigned with him – and some of their campaigns were pretty dramatic – inflicted major damage on white South Africa’s soft sports-loving underbelly. Legendary rugby boss Danie Craven said during Hain’s Stop the Seventy Tour in the 1970s: “There will be a black Springbok over my dead body.” Well, we know how that turned out. This is Hain’s autobiography, starting with his boyhood in a family of both liberal and Liberal Party principles in Pretoria, where he attended Pretoria Boys’ High, to his departure with his family to the UK, his rising political profile within the Labour Party and the anti-sports tours campaign, to his becoming a Labour MP and eventually British peer, still fighting for justice. South Africa remains close to his heart, but he certainly doesn’t subscribe to the adage of “my country right or wrong”. He celebrated in 1994, but doesn’t pull his punches when assessing where we are today. Now 71, he is still fighting campaigns, and has given testimony to the Zondo Commission. He says (his italics): “I have learnt that if you try to do too much, you’ll end up doing too little, that if you try to do everything, you’ll end up doing nothing. Better to focus on concrete objectives and not to get carried away with grand designs, ideological rhetoric or the supercilious purism of the armchair critic. Instead, as Alan Paton once counselled me, try to be an all-or-something person, not an all-or-nothing person.”
Although Razina Theba lived with her parents and sister, every day she would find her way to the tiny flat occupied by her grandparents in Vorster Street, Fordsburg. The older couple had brought up seven children in it, and though by the time Razina came along, most had married and left, it was still the family HQ to which uncles and aunties and many cousins gravitated. All the residents in the block were of Indian descent, and lived together in loose neighbourliness, swopping cakes and snacks at Eid and Diwala. Theba has written a charming, often sad, occasionally frightening story of an Muslim family in the dying days of apartheid.
The authors of this book, teachers and educationalists, have managed an astonishing feat – a compilation of South African history in just under 300 pages (although with pretty small print). As the subtitle indicates, the volume begins with the ancestors of the modern San over 10 000 years ago, but concedes little is known of those societies. It is written in two parts: a chronological history and then a section on themes in South African history, such as the economy, the Bantustans, life under apartheid and the trade union movement. At the end of each chapter are a set of discussion questions as well as book titles for additional reading, and a list of online visual resources. The authors say they have not produced a comprehensive history, but are rather trying to present a progressive introduction to local history and to encourage critical thinking about it, because most South Africans, those who were schooled both before and after 1994, have scant knowledge of the country’s past. In his foreword, former president Kgalema Motlanthe says: “History is not just an account of past events. It is also an interpretation of those events and developments… It is for this reason history is deeply political.”
Ada Kazantzakis is 16, in her second-last year of school in north London. She lives with her father, Kostas; her mother is dead. She knows very little about her family history, only that her parents, one Greek and one Turkish, came from the now divided island of Cyprus. Her parents did not talk about their families or their youth, and when her mother died no one from Cyprus bothered to come to her funeral. But back in 1974, teenagers Kostas, who is Greek and Defne, who is Turkish, meet in secret in a tavern, a place where they are able to forget the sorrows and tensions of their island. In the tavern a fig tree grows through a hole in the roof, and the tree knows the teenagers’ secrets. It’s also there when Nicosia is destroyed and the teenagers have to part. Years later, the only link Ada has to her home is a cosseted fig tree growing in the back garden. Elif Shafak, a prize-winning British Turkish writer whose work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has dedicated this novel to: “Immigrants and exiles everywhere, the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless, and to the trees we left behind…”
Hollow’s Edge is a quiet community on the edge of a lake. Everyone knows everyone else, and they’re supportive of each other. But then one night Brandon and Fiona Truett are found dead, and their neighbour, Ruby Fletcher, is convicted of their murder. But after a mistrial she is freed, and she comes back to Hollow’s Edge, to the consternation of the community in general and of her old housemate, Harper Nash in particular. People start to turn on each other and it soon becomes clear that not everyone was honest about the events on the night the Truetts died. Harper realises it is time she tried to uncover the truth. The Observer has described this book as “An unnerving and extremely classy thriller.”
The Promise (Chatto & Windus), which spans a period of 40 years, is about the white Swart family who live on a smallholding outside Pretoria and is trying to come to terms with the new South Africa. It is based around four family funerals, and describes how the family unravels over a promise made to their long-time domestic worker.
The Passage North (Granta) is an attempt to come to terms with life in the wake of devastation of Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war. It tells the story of Krishan who makes the long train journey from the capital Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province to attend a family funeral. This is Arudpragasam’s second novel.
No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus/ Jonathan Ball) is described as “a delightfully profane love letter to the infinite scroll, and a meditation on love, language, and the human connection.
The Fortune Men (Viking) is a gripping novel, based on fact, about a petty thief in Cardiff, Wales. In 1952 he became the last man to be hanged there, after being wrongfully convicted of murder. Mahmood Mattan, a Somali seaman, isn’t too worried when he is arrested for the murder of a local shopkeeper – after all, this is Britain which is a country of justice. But eventually it dawns on him that innocence may not be enough.
Bewilderment (Hutchinson Heinmann) tells the story of an astrobiologist, Theo Byrne, and his troubled son, nine-year-old Robin, who is about to be expelled from school for smashing a metal Thermos into his friend’s face. His father believes the only thing to do is take Robin to other planets, while helping him to save this one.
Great Circle (Transworld) is the story of a daredevil woman pilot who delivers Spitfires in World War II and in 1950 sets off on an ultimately doomed north-south circumnavigation of the Earth. And it is the story of a spoiled young actress who is chosen to play her in a Hollywood biopic.
Two chance encounters in and near Florence in 1944, as the allied forces retake the city, will shape the life of a young British soldier forever.
Eric Axelson is a forgotten figure of South Africa’s wartime history. He was so often at the frontline that he might even be a forgotten hero. Axelson was a soldier, but he was mostly a historian. Ian van der Waag, himself a military historian, has given a small nudge towards Axelson’s resurrection.
Lottie Archer is a London archivist who meets Tom at a wedding and falls in love. He lives in Rome, where he works for the British Council.
The trouble with fake history – like fake news – is you end up not knowing what to believe.
Remember the great comeback from Winston Churchill when British Labour MP Bessie Braddock him: “You’re drunk!” To which he replied: “And you’re ugly, but in the morning I’ll be sober.” Apparently Boris Johnson, Britain’s current prime minister and a great Churchill fan, has identified the very spot in Westminster where the exchange took place. But journalist Otto English says it probably never happened. It was first related by English writer Augustus Hare in his diary about an encounter between two unnamed British MPs in 1882, when Churchill was eight years old and Braddock not yet born. This is just one of English’s fake-history put-downs in this fascinating book that exposes myths of World War II, the adventures of Christopher Columbus (who never set foot on the continents of north or south America), the belief that Britain’s royal family is German, that Abraham Lincoln believed all men were created equal and that ancient people thought the Earth was flat (they knew it wasn’t).
Veteran novelist Douglas Kennedy, who has been described as the “maestro of family noir”, has written about one of big divisive issues of our time: abortion. An Uber driver has to drop off a retired professor at the abortion clinic where she volunteers, and is caught up in a violent vortex of protest. Afraid of the Light is described as “a novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity”.
Lottie is an archivist at Britain’s National Archives at Kew when she meets Tom at a wedding. He lives in Rome, and within nine months persuades her to marry him. A whole new life beckons for Lottie when she secures a job as an archivist in the eternal city. She discovers a valuable 15th century painting, and decides to explore the life of Nina Lawrence, the woman who left it behind. Nina had gone to Rome after World War II to restore gardens that had been devastated by war. But when she died in 1978 no one attended her funeral and Lottie is puzzled by this. She uncovers a complicated love story set in the turmoil of post-war Italy, and what she finds will come to affect her own future. Elizabeth Buchan is a best-selling prize-winning British novelist and Two Women in Rome looks like a wonderful read.
Twenty-six-year-old Nella works as an editorial assistant at a New York publishing company. But the job isn’t great in that she’s the only black employee, and she becomes tired of loneliness and what she sees as her colleagues’ micro-aggression. And then Hazel, another black woman, joins the staff, and Nella is delighted. They hit it off, but a series of events follow which leave Nella under a cloud of opprobrium while Hazel is seen as the office darling. Shortly after this, nasty notes appear on Nella’s desk saying she should resign. Is Hazel writing them? What is going on? Soon Nella realises there is more than her career at stake. This novel has been described as “dark, funny and furiously entertaining”.
Comrade Editor – on life, journalism and the birth of Namibia, by Gwen Lister (Tafelberg)
I am not a nervous air passenger. I have every faith that the pilots know what they’re doing, and ditto for air traffic control and the maintenance staff.
In her acknowledgements at the end of this marvellous novel, author Maggie Shipstead thanks her editor for “paring down an unwieldy thousand-page manuscript into this slender wisp of a thing”.