South Africa Lost and Found : MY TRAITOR’S HEART A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe and His Conscience <i> by Rian Malan (A Morgan Entrekin Book/ Atlantic Monthly: $19.95; 372 pp.; 0-87113-229-X) </i>

It is difficult, often impossible, to render understandable the brutal ambiguities of South African life and politics. That has not stopped people from trying, and the results, too often, are merely worthy or simplistic. South Africa is a well of self-righteousness where the world comes to drink.

Now along comes Rian Malan, a member of the white master tribe of Southern Africa. He writes the story of his life and the history of his family in a fusion of heart-searching memoir, political analysis and philosophical investigation. “My Traitor’s Heart” strips aside hypocrisies and simplicities and casts a harsh, brilliant light on that lovely, surreal land.

Malan grew up as a fairly typical example of an urbanized Afrikaner. His French Huguenot forebears settled in South Africa in the 17th Century; since then, one or another member of the family has been woven into the history of the country.

It was as a teen-ager in the early ‘70s that the young Rian became a convert to “communism”--less an ideology than a way of cocking a snook at his middle-class Afrikaner family. His predicament--yearning for solutions, yet unable to act--was shared by many white South African liberals. Contemplating the gulf between themselves and the black masses who had no choice but to endure, they questioned their own identities: Were they preachers or killers? Tourists or marksmen? Masters or victims?

Malan’s youthful revolutionary chic culminated in an enormous slogan he daubed on a roadside embankment: “Say It Out Loud, I’m Black & I’m Proud.” The response of his illiterate black maidservant to this piece of street theater was salutary. She told him to get lost.

And that, in a sense, is just what he did. Malan became a reporter, a profession that has always attracted lunatics and liberals (and in South Africa, it is not always possible to tell the difference). But the blood and guts of crime reporting in the black townships--where murders far exceed the uncertain example of cities such as New York--together with the 1976 uprising in Soweto, got too much for even a hard-nosed reporter. Then there was the looming threat of military service, so Malan did a bunk. He fled overseas, and became, he confesses, one of those dinner-table liberals to be found in many foreign cities, singing for their suppers by telling well-disposed foreigners what they already know.

But the half-life of semi-exile in affluent Los Angeles simply would not do. In the mid-’80s, Malan returned to find Africa anything but maternal. Those who hated her, she destroyed. She did the same for those who loved her, only it took a little longer.

His old illusions died one by one. The battle lines were drawn: “If you were white in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were a target.” Thus a “liberal” uncle is beaten up for trying to do a favor for an old employee. An altruistic white doctor is murdered by blacks who only a few days before may well have been his patients. Visiting French dignitaries are stoned in the squatter camp of Crossroads, outside Cape Town.

When the smoke clears and the dead are buried, the eternal war, ferocious and implacable, between indigenous black and interloping white continues in the old and deadly tradition, a struggle that the first Malan, back in the 17th Century, would have recognized immediately.

It is one of the distinctions of this extraordinary book that Malan is as clear-eyed in analyzing his own moral posturing as he is in attacking the lunacies of apartheid. Nor does he spare the reader. At one point in his anguished, riveting narrative, he cries out: “Am I upsetting you, my friend? Good. Do you want to argue? Do you want me to tell you about the evil of apartheid? Do you want to talk about democracy and the allied civil and human rights that fall under the umbra of its name? OK. Let’s open my bulging files of tales of ordinary murder. You choose your weapons and I’ll choose mine, and we’ll annihilate the certainties in one another’s brains.”

His “files” are indeed disturbing. There is the mysterious “hammerman” who terrorizes a white town in the heart of Zululand, falling on white couples in the dead of night and smashing in their heads with a claw hammer. Dirt-poor black farmers murder each other in ancient tribal vendettas. Black children execute each other. Whites cultivate the spiritual “deformity” of black hatred. Yet well-disposed whites who turn from hate to love often are struck down.

“My Traitor’s Heart,” a relentless survey of African love and horror, closes with the story of a white couple, the Alcocks, who come as close to being South African saints as that benighted country is ever likely to produce.

The Alcocks’ mission was one of unconditional love in a bitterly impoverished rural slum hard by the Tugela River in Zululand. In this “ecological Hiroshima,” the Alcocks successfully established a rudimentary survival station. They failed, miserably. Neil Alcock was killed by the people he gave his life to save; his widow was nearly destroyed.

Malan’s book is not a Greek tragedy. There is no catharsis, no saving grace. Instead, there is a kind of sustaining paradox. If “My Traitor’s Heart” offers little cause for hope, it does not admit despair either. It is a passionate, blazingly honest testament to the way things are, a white-hot book of revelations punctuated by murders, confessions, deceits--and saintliness.

Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way.