Review: Vivien Horler
Under a Blood Red Sky, by Annemarie van Niekerk, translated by Michiel Heyns (Tafelberg)
SA-born Nobel Laureate and twice Booker Prize winner JM Coetzee says: “We can best explore the deep history of a society through first-hand testimonies of personal experience. [This book] allows us privileged insight into life as it is and has been in the South Africa of our times.”
Dr Annemarie van Niekerk is a feminist, an academic, and a woman who has edited several titles on women’s literature in Africa. Now in her 60s, she grew up in what was then Port Elizabeth in a loving but strict Afrikaans Nationalist family, one of three daughters, and currently lives in the Netherlands with her husband and son.
That’s the thumbnail sketch. The fleshed-out version is much more interesting, challenging and thought-provoking. Under a Blood Red Sky – the title comes from the U2 song New Year’s Day – tells her story against the background of life in South Africa over the past 60 or so years, and reminds us how strange it is to grow up here and witness the tests of history, from apartheid to the new SA, and the contradictions they throw up.
I’m making this sound like a very earnest treatise, and it’s not. It’s extremely readable, often poetically beautiful, a love story about the country, and a tale of violence.
It opens with a ghastly attack. In her 20s Van Niekerk begins teaching Afrikaans literature at the University of the Transkei in Umtata (now one of Walter Sisulu University’s campuses). Her neighbour is a gentle man called Ruben Gouws, who teaches at a school for the deaf, and whose hobbies include music, art, and restoring old furniture. While living in Umtata, Van Niekerk often visits Ruben’s family farm.
He had grown up on Pinevale, a farm between the villages of Indwe and Elliot, and later moved back to the area as principal of a local farm school so he could be a comfort and companion to his elderly widowed mother.
Despite Van Niekerk moving on, and Ruben retiring, the pair remain in touch. And then one day in August 2015, when Van Niekerk is living in the Netherlands, she receives a message: Ruben and Tannie Hermien have been murdered.
Two of the three young men arrested for the attack are former pupils of Ruben’s.
Van Niekerk immediately goes back to the Eastern Cape for the funerals.
Journeys are the frame of the narrative: Van Niekerk’s road trip with her father from Port Elizabeth to Umtata before she starts work there, and during which she muses about her childhood; the trip back from the Netherlands to the Eastern Cape for the funerals, and a return journey a year later from Amsterdam to the Eastern Cape, during which she stops in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) to read the court records of the murderers’ trial.
But it’s a loose frame, and much of the narrative is not really about journeys at all. Her father, an academic at the University of Port Elizabeth and always referred to as Pa, loves her but is strict and says he has to beat the devil out of her. After a beating, she has to tell him she loves him.
The family considers themselves good to their black domestic workers who are “part of the family”, but who, as Van Niekerk puts it to Pa, sleep in tiny back rooms and are given the blue tissue apple wrappings as toilet paper.
Once she is settled in Umtata (now Mtata) Van Niekerk meets a fellow academic called Denzel Daniels, who is black. There is an immediate attraction, and it is the beginning of a turbulent relationship that lasts seven years. Pa is scandalised, and begins a campaign of letters to bring her back to the Nationalist fold. In one letter he tells her he has set up a 24-hour prayer group so that at every hour of the day and night someone is praying for her to renounce her relationship.
The couple moves to Hillbrow in Johannesburg – because it is one of the few places in SA where mixed-race couples can live together – and continue their academic careers, also becoming activists involved with the Congress of South African Writers, whose members include Nadine Gordimer, Achmat Dangor and Njabulo Ndebele.
But the relationship with Denzel, a man of deep resentment despite his successful academic career, is not going well, and it ends in violence and a betrayal, on Van Niekerk’s part, of loyal friendships.
Meanwhile South Africa is moving on, and Nelson Mandela is released from prison in 1990. Two years later Van Niekerk, deeply involved in feminist literary criticism, is invited to a conference in Nigeria on “building bridges across activism and the academy”. She is to present a paper and to moderate a discussion.
But the conference is a humiliation. There are 12 South African participants, both black and white. At first all goes well, but on the second day the white South Africans are called to a meeting with their black counterparts. There is a feeling, Van Niekerk and her colleagues are told, that the conference is about women from Africa and the diaspora, and once again white women are claiming the limelight.
It is decided the white women can speak at the end of the conference, provided there is time. But by then everyone is tired and wants to go home. Van Niekerk writes: “So that’s what it feels like. Exactly like this. To be marginalised. To be outvoted. To be silenced.”
Later, in a dream, she is told by a judge: “You need to confront your own myths, because the nature of your complicity is probably locked up in them… confession initiates the penance.”
Yoh – this is tough stuff. But Van Niekerk takes it in, ponders carefully, and does her best to come to terms with the legacy of being a white Afrikaans woman in Africa. (We won’t even go into the legacy of being a white British-born woman in Africa.) But it is thoughtful, often provocative, and never opts for the trite answers.
Sometimes I felt, reading this book, that it was meant for non-South Africans as it recounts information and events we are familiar with. And I think it was – it was originally published in Dutch in 2021with the title Om het hart terug te brengen, and later in Afrikaans. Now we have Michiel Heyns’s masterful English translation.
Reviewers, particularly Dutch reviewers, say every South African should read it. They’re probably right.
Poignantly, the book is dedicated to the “memory of Ruben Gouws and all victims of violence in South Africa”. And there are millions.