Divided Loyalties : A Liberal Afrikaner Explores His Own ‘Racist Heart’ to Probe the Complexity of South African Apartheid

The newly feted South African author, Rian Malan, has the anguished look and agitated manner of a man who has suffered for causes and then doubted them--who has had the courage to search out his country’s secret heart of darkness but questioned his own motivation in betraying that secret to the world.

Doubt. Ambiguity. The unresolvable clash of opposing loyalties. These are the wraiths that seem to hover in the cigarette smoke Malan persists in exhaling. These, added to terror, are the furies that dwell in his traitor’s heart.

At 35, Malan has written a blaze of a book (“My Traitor’s Heart,” Atlantic Monthly Press, $19.95) that attracted the praise of such highly respected authors as James Dickey and Don DeLillo before it was published. These advance notices launched what they describe as Malan’s soul-baring memoir into the center of critical attention, making this little-known writer with a famous Afrikaner surname the author of a major book.

But Malan’s passionate rendering of the South African experience diverges from the path into a hoped-for future free of apartheid envisioned by authors who have become synonymous with South Africa like Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Andre Brink. Malan argues that his is perhaps the first book that tries to capture his country’s problems in all their complexity, a book in which there are crimes on all sides.

He is, self-avowedly, a complex figure. The descendant of Boer settlers who came to South Africa 300 years ago, and a great-nephew of the prime minister known as the architect of apartheid, Malan is a writer of liberal credentials who indicts black violence in his new book and admits to fear of black Africans.

A former police reporter for The Johannesburg Star, he says he left his country in 1977 rather than be drafted and lived for eight years in the United States, settling in Los Angeles. He eventually became bored with a life style that lacked the bracing quality of constant political struggle. So he returned to his homeland in 1985 “on the same day Ted Kennedy arrived there” to face, according to the book’s subtitle, “his country, his tribe and his conscience,” and to amass material for what eventually became this book.

However, such was the effect of the political turmoil on him that he left South Africa again to collect his thoughts, and “My Traitor’s Heart” was written in the United States. “I had what South Africans describe as a case of ‘unrest fever’: It’s a condition of advanced psychic dislocation and I think it affected everyone in the country at that stage,” he says.

As cigarette blends into cigarette on a recent afternoon in the midst of a coast-to-coast publicity tour, Malan reveals the pain he has felt in confronting what he sees as the unpalatable truth about his fellow countrymen, white and black, and the anger he still feels at those who view his country in overly simplistic terms.

Malan has recorded in grim detail some of the horrific crimes of white against black that are familiar to anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the struggle waged against apartheid in his country.

What will be more unusual to American eyes is a liberal writer’s inclusion of the record of violence that blacks have perpetrated against whites and a soul-shaking depiction of the atrocities he says are committed by black against black. Malan now wonders if he went too far in the book, and whether the facts he has chosen to include will convey an impression different from what he intended.

He wanted “My Traitor’s Heart” to get attention and he admits that it is possible he included so much violence to be sure that it received it. And he is aware that the messenger is often blamed for the message he delivers.

“The things I wanted to express seemed so far away from the ordinary American imagination that I felt I needed really powerful weapons--cudgels, heavy weapons,” he says.

It was a mission, he explains, to set the record on his country straight. “My book in a way is kind of reactionary. I got so mad about the way a certain American newspaper covered South Africa that I wanted to leap up and tear out the throat of the nearest Just White Man. That’s a pretty extreme thing to say.”

As Malan explains in his book, a Just White Man is a white who thinks he can understand the complicated intra- and intertribal machinations of South African blacks from a white liberal perspective.

Malan insists that his divided loyalties make it very difficult for him to choose sides and he dwells on the impossibility of being right if you are white as one of the forces that drove him into exile. Thus he lives with conflict and ambiguity waging war inside him rather than sell out to an imperfect resolution.

“About 5,000 people are said to have died in South African political violence in the course of the last five years. South African police came to be responsible for at least 17% of these. At least 80% died in other circumstances,” says Malan. “The Western media and the South African media choose to ignore those crimes.”

“My Traitor’s Heart” seeks to delve into some of those circumstances--what Malan sees as the aspects of black experience in South Africa that are difficult for whites to understand. This includes ritual killings, witchcraft and voodoo, extreme retaliation against collaborators and violence toward whites who have made efforts to show their identification with the black cause. In light of the wave of idealistic jubilation taking place over the planned release of Nelson Mandela, it makes difficult reading.

One of the central crimes in the book, the story of Simon Mpungose, “The Hammerman,” a black who murdered whites in their beds, started out with Malan investigating what he presumed was another of the results of the evils of apartheid but turned out to be more complicated than that. Mpungose’s criminal mind was forged, Malan discovered, by what he sees as African superstitions about the results of an incestuous union among Mpungose’s ancestors.

Malan says he worries that the attention he has given to these aspects of black experience could be construed as racist. And indeed, at one place in the book he confesses to knowing he has, in some ways, a “racist heart.” This, he balances with the liberal credentials he has amassed over the years: his black friends, his engagement with his country’s struggle, his effort to get to the truth at the heart of the tensions in South Africa despite a considerable personal cost.

“I knew when I was writing this book it would get me into a great deal of trouble. I knew I was going to outrage lots and lots of people. I thought on this tour I’d be nailed to the wall by journalists at every spot--but thus far I haven’t been,” Malan says. He adds that when he returns to South Africa people on all sides of the struggle may be angry at him.

“Most of my friends in South Africa are leftists and they listened to things that I would say and things that I intended to do. And they’d say to me, ‘Aren’t you afraid that you’ll go to hell?’

“I tell you who I do owe an apology to and that is the middle-class black South Africans. They come to me at night and torment me in dreams and say ‘Why do so few of us appear in your book?’ ”

Malan is a tall, thin, charming, apparently high-strung man with a sculptured face that stared out of the cover of Esquire magazine in 1985 when the germinal essay of his book was published. He tends to resort easily to the high-flown rhetoric of someone who has spent a good proportion of his youth making sure he has been present at the key events of his country’s recent agonized past. He talks very quickly in his native Afrikaner accent.

His dedication to the truth he sees about South Africa is in part, as he says, to do with his ancestors, and he has devoted much of the first section of his book to an investigation of their history as early Boer settlers. Malan makes clear in his book the distaste he has for some black African religious beliefs and practices, particularly the belief that the shades of dead ancestors interact with the living. Yet he speaks passionately of the influence his dead ancestors, the “white tribe,” the Afrikaners, has had on him--and specifically how he has been influenced in complex ways by previous Malans.

They have left, in his words, a bloody trajectory across three centuries of African history. “Malan is a name that has a ring to it, particularly in the ears of blacks,” he says.

That is hardly surprising. His great-uncle, Daniel F. Malan, was prime minister of South Africa in the 1940s and introduced the laws that established apartheid. The airport at Cape Town bears his name. Another quite distant relative is Magnus Malan, the current South African minister of defense.

“The burden of history rested quite heavily on me at one stage,” says Malan. “You think if your name’s Malan you’ve got to do a little more than most people do in the course of atoning.

“I spent a lot of my life pretending that I was somebody else and, at moments, regretting my last name. But it struck me when I was 30-odd that there was nothing so pathetic as someone who denies what he essentially is.”

Malan apparently believes in wearing his heart on his sleeve, and perhaps the crux of his book lies in his admission that one dark night when he was visiting a black friend in Soweto he realized on a gut level that he was afraid of black people. He worried that he would literally be harmed by them, and he knew he had an incomprehension of their differences from him.

It is a feeling he knows he shares with his fellow Afrikaners--one that is near to the heart of his country’s problems.

“The behavior of white South Africans as a body politic is governed to a substantial extent by fear,” he says. But he emphasizes that during his eight-year exile from South Africa he came to see that Americans, too, are not entirely exempt from feelings of that sort.

Malan readily admits there is an irrational element in this fear. The transition to black rule in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, has been, he says, “a whole lot better than the worst fears of whites.” But, he adds, “I think you’d find that most whites do not see a long-term future for themselves there.

“South Africa makes fools of anyone who tries to predict its future,” Malan says. And he describes South African President Frederik W. de Klerk’s decision last week to revoke the ban on the African National Congress and other groups as an example of the atmosphere of change that exists in his country now--a significantly different mood than that which existed during the mid-’80s, the period covered in “My Traitor’s Heart.”

“I think it’s about time,” Malan says of the revocation of the ban on the ANC. “But it’s very naive to believe this is the end of anything in South Africa. It heralds the start of something new--a long and painful process of negotiation. I trust it will be negotiation rather than violence.

“There’s one question on the table: Will South Africa become a democracy in a non-racial sense that the ANC and other people hope for?

“But underlying politics in South Africa is this enormous gulf of culture and consciousness. Will we be able to bridge the gap of the mutually blinding fear that separates us from one another?

“The government has done its best to demonize the ANC and the government’s opposition has done its best to mythologize the ANC. Now we will see the real ANC emerge.

“The attitude of most whites will be guarded apprehension. I would have imagined there would be a great explosion of euphoria among blacks, but so far there hasn’t been.”

The final third of Malan’s book deals with the poignant story of Neil and Creina Alcock--a story that is emblematic of Africa, Malan believes. The Alcocks, who after their treatment in Malan’s book may well become a legend in the West, have come as close as any white South African ever has to entering the reality of being black in their country.

Shedding virtually all the trappings of white society, the Alcocks lived in a mud hut by a river in one of the most inhospitable and hostile territories in South Africa, a place called Msinga (“The Place of Lost Grasses”). They devoted their lives to developing an agricultural co-operative, to helping Msinga become a productive place.

But in the end, Malan reports, Neil Alcock was murdered, caught between rival Zulu factions. His widow, Creina, continues to live in Msinga and has salvaged through incredible effort an existence for herself despite opposition from whites, blacks and the elements. If there is a hero or heroine in this bleak book, it is she.

Malan clearly admires Creina Alcock greatly, and yet he knows that her story is as frightening as it is inspiring: Even saint-like figures such as the Alcocks have suffered almost past endurance because of the chasm between blacks and whites.

Rian Malan is pleased that he has had the opportunity he longed for to acquaint Americans with the fact that South Africa is a more complicated place than most of the media suggest. “Confusion and compromise are fertile grounds for democracy.”

He will return to South Africa in February, but is unsure if he will have to face the consequences of his self-publicized draft-dodging. He hopes to write for the highly respected magazine Frontline--one of the few South African publications that avoids stereotypes, he says.

But his life remains fluid, undefined, ambiguous. “I have a word processor in Johannesburg and a word processor in Los Angeles, a suitcase full of clothes and a case full of books,” he says. And now there is celebrity to add to the burden that dwells in his ambivalent heart.