Issue 19, 2013 - Balliol College - University of Oxford

also shorthand for the expression of
a great fear: that beneath the cover
of South Africa’s reconciliatory
transition to democracy, the country’s
unfinished revolution against landed
whites was covertly underway.
I went out into the countryside
looking for a farm murder to write
about. In the midlands of KwaZulu-
Natal, I heard of a killing that
piqued my interest. A 28-year-old
white man had been ambushed
and shot dead on his father’s farm.
The white family had bought the
property less than a year earlier.
Immediately, a dispute had arisen
between them and the nine black
tenant families who had lived on the
farm for the last three generations.
On the day of the murder, all the
black men who lived on the farm
cleared out. In the following weeks
they started drifting back, settled
into their homes and resumed daily
life. I had clearly come across a
hugely emblematic story, about race,
land, change; about communication
across frontiers, about justice.
It was a story I very much
wanted to write.
I introduced myself
to the grieving father a
couple of months after
the murder. He spoke
with me, he warmed to
the idea of my writing
about the murder, he took
me into his home. I, of
course, took mental notes
about the furniture, about
the absence of photographs
of the dead man in the
public parts of the house.
The father told me a little of
his personal history, and I
scanned that, too, for many
things, among them his
unloved parts.
Step back and look at the
narrative structure into which
I would inevitably place
the parts of him that I was
gathering. He bought a farm,
moved in, and his relationship
with the people who lived
there immediately soured.
Things escalated. His son was
killed. I was looking for the
places where his soul shatters
and his consciousness crumbles
– these things are not hard to
find in a man who has just lost
his son – in order to tell a story
about why his relationship with
his new tenants disintegrated the
moment it began. However well
I might write the book, however
subtly I might depict the historical
forces shaping the situation and
the people in it, the fact remained
that in straining to deliver to the
reader his shattered soul and his
crumbling consciousness, I was
also offering an explanation of why
his son died. That his weakness or
blindness or his sheer racism lay at
the bottom of his son’s death was a
constant possibility, even if it was
one that never materialised. It was in
fact the very possibility that gave the
narrative its energy.
That’s what I was doing. What
was he doing Well, he was grieving,
deeply, and the vengeance inside
him was boiling over. He could not
believe that these people had killed
his son and gone on with their
lives without consequence, on his
doorstep. But he also very much
needed to keep a boundary between
them and him: the boundary
between the civilised and the
uncivilised. As much as he might
want to, he could not butcher one
of them – for if he were to do so he
would lose his sense of self as well as
his liberty.
And so one of the substitutes he
went for was exposure – expose a
little of himself to a writer in order
to expose his enemy to the world.
A fair exchange.
The week the book was
published, it was extracted in his
local newspaper and all of his
neighbours read it: the description
of the furniture in his lounge, of the
absence of photographs. Why did
you let him in, they asked Why
did you let him describe your house
that way Why did you allow him
to use you to get at us
For it was of course as if all their
homes had been flung open to
the eyes of strangers; as if all their
relationships with black tenants
had been held up for scrutiny. Only
now did he realise what he had
done. Until the day his neighbours
read the book, he had thought he
had been trading only his own
shattered soul.
1 David Grossman,
Writing in the Dark:
Essays on Literature
and Politics (London:
Bloomsbury, 2009),
p. 37.
2 London: Jonathan
Cape, 2011.
3 Johannesburg:
Jonathan Ball, 2007.
issue no.19 MAY 2013
29