A White South African’s Struggle With Loyalties and Identity

EMPIRE SETTINGS

A Novel

By David Schmahmann

White Pine Press

336 pages; $21.95

*

In the mid-19th century, long before diamond and gold mining interests brought Britain into conflict with South Africa’s Dutch and Huguenot settlers in other parts of the country, the British had established a presence in South Africa in the subtropical province of Natal and its chief port, Durban.

Insofar as the British raj had an outpost in South Africa, this was it, complete with stuffy clubs, colonial architecture and even immigrants from India. The majority of the region’s population, however, then as now, were the Zulus, who fared badly under the British and even worse under the repressive policy of apartheid instituted by the Afrikaner Nationalist government, starting in 1948.

Durban is one of the “empire settings” of David Schmahmann’s thoughtful, affecting and skillfully constructed first novel about the dilemmas--romantic, fiduciary and financial--confronting a white South African who immigrated to the U.S. in the wake of a forbidden love affair in the late 1970s, when interracial unions were still outlawed.

Twenty years later, as the novel opens in Boston (another former outpost of empire), the protagonist Danny Divin is in his 40s, a successful financial consultant, still married to Tesseba, the free-spirited American woman who impulsively and altruistically offered to wed him when he was young and struggling to establish grounds for citizenship.

Yet all these years, he has been carrying a torch for Santi, the mixed-race (half-white, half-Zulu) woman he fell in love with in Durban. Now, in the new post-apartheid South Africa, there are no laws against interracial marriage.

But, as Danny often finds himself thinking, there’s been a lot of water over the dam since then. Unresolved feelings for the woman he left behind are only one aspect of the complicated loyalties and values with which Danny has been living.

There’s also the continuing problem of his relationship with his mother, Helga, a formidable woman who became a prominent foe of the apartheid regime in the 1960s.

Now living in London with her second husband, a man Danny loathes, Helga is a daunting bundle of contradictions.

She deplores racism, although when they were still living in South Africa she insisted, out of a sense of loyalty to the country, that Danny serve his time in an army engaged in the suppression of black resistance movements.

While her first husband, Danny’s father, was an ethical businessman who supported her political career, her second husband is a coarse, shifty businessman who has been urging her to use underhanded ways to get her family fortune out of South Africa. When Danny demurs, she declares: “I raised you too decent for your own good.”

So when, after all this time, Danny decides to revisit the Durban of the new South Africa, he must confront questions of love, money and family loyalty. Schmahmann has no problem generating suspense as he portrays the various conflicting pressures affecting his protagonist. One way in which he illuminates the complexity of the situation is by introducing the voices of other narrators.

In addition to Danny, who narrates the novel’s first and final sections, we hear from his mother, Helga; from his sister, Bridget; from the Divins’ former cook, Baptie, still living in South Africa; and from Santi, Danny’s first love, now teaching at a university. The personae and their voices are convincingly distinct, and each of their narratives provides a fresh perspective on the others.

Schmahmann’s portrayal of South Africa, past and present, is as poignant--and as nuanced--as his delineation of the characters and their relationships. Focusing on one man’s struggle with loyalties and identity, “Empire Settings” also sheds light on the larger issues confronting a country in the process of reshaping its identity.