My Traitor's Heart
by
Rian Malan

"The book Rian Malan set out to write was altogether more conventional
than the one he has written.  It was supposed to be a history of the
great and detested Malan family, as told by its kafferboetie (that is,
'brother of blacks', 'nigger-lover') renegade.  But along the way he
ran into, and faced up to, the truth that is the making of his book
that for all his nigger-loving, leftist views, for all his long hair
and days smoking zol (dope) on the hillsides in the mystical Toikeinish
company of 'wise old Afs', for all his daubing pro black slogans on the
walls of Johannesburg's northern suburbs, where scarcely a black would
ever see them, he was still a Malan; that he could only write about the
atrocity of South Africa by admitting the atrocity hidden in his own
traitorous heart ... Here, as in nothing I've read before, is the
demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa ... The old woman,
Creina Alcock, tells Rian Malan: "Love is worth nothing until it has
been tested by its own defeat ... Love is to enable you to transcend
defeat."  My Traitor's Heart, which tells us of the defeat of its
author's illusions, his ideals, his sense of his own goodness, his
courage, and his ability to comprehend his fellow South Africans as
they dance their death-dances, which is full of bitterness, cynicism,
anger and storms, is a triumphant instance of this type of defeated
love."

Salrnan Rusbdie


"Has there ever been a better moment to remind ourselves of the essence
of the South African situation, which is fear and hatred, racial fear
and racial hatred?  This is ... a magnificent book, an explosion of
truth-telling at a time when we are being given so much half-informed
and over-optimistic simplification.  Malan belongs in a line of
Afrikaner breast-beating."

Times Literary Supplement

"Unusual, vivid, raw and revealing- those were the words that came to
mind when I finished Rian Malan's powerful book ... This is an
impressive book, and a useful one to read in view of the current
momentous developments in South Africa.  It reminds us of the scale of
challenge that will face all South Africans in the post-apartheid era,
and that the new South Africa, in its formative years, will be as
dangerous as it will be exciting.  It will be best served by the
passion and candour of young patriots like Rian Malan and other whites
determined to undo the harm done by their ancestors over so many years
of fear, hatred and violence."

Donald Woods, Sunday Times

"The remorseless exercise of a reporter's anguished conscience gives us
a South Africa we thought we knew all about:

but we knew nothing"

John Le Carr

"A great swirling devil of a book and it is equal in every way to its
vast subject the black and white country of the heart"

Don Delillo

"Rian Malan has written a tragic masterpiece and a classic of our
time"

Time Out

"My Traitor's Heart is a tremendous book about candour, honour and
race, a wireess-bearing act of the rarest courage.  No one who reads it
could ever forget it."

Michael Herr

The right of Rian Malan to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Courier International Ltd, Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 09 974900 9 For the forgotten legions of the South African
centre, for my parents, and for Creina, who took the enormous risk of
trusting me.

How do I live in this strange place?

- BERNOLDUS NIEMAND, from the Boer reggae song, "Reggae Vibes Is
Cool'

I'M BURNED OUT and starving to death, so I'm just going to lay this all
upon you and trust that you're a visionary reader, because the grand
design, such as it is, is going to be hard for you to see.  I know
you're interested in my ancestors, so I guess I should begin at the
very beginning.  I am a Malan, descendant of Jacques Malan, a Huguenot
who fled the France of Louis XIV to escape being put to the sword for
his Protestant faith.

He sought refuge among the Dutch, only to be put aboard ship in 1688
and sent to the Dark Continent, to the rude Dutch colony at the Cape of
Good Hope.  Jacques the Huguenot was the first Malan in Africa.  In the
centuries since, a Malan has been present at all the great dramas and
turning points in the history of the Afrikaner tribe.

Jacques tamed the Cape and planted vineyards.  His sons built gracious
gabled homesteads in the lee of Table Mountain.  His grandson Dawid the
Younger ran off to the wild frontier in 1788, where he fought the
savage Xhosa and took part in Slagtersnek, the first Afrikaner
rebellion against the British.

Hercules, son of Dawid the Younger, led the third wave of Voortrekkers
into the heart of Africa.  In February 1838 he sat in the kraal of the
great king Dingaan, watching a huge Zulu army wheeling back and forth
on the plain.  The sun glinted off thousands of spears.  Feet thundered
in unison.  Clouds of dust rose into the sky.  And then Dingaan cried,
"Kill the wizards," and Hercules and his seventy companions were
murdered stakes driven up their anuses, skulls smashed with stones, and
their bodies left on a hill for the vultures.

Once the killing was done, King Dingaan pointed, and his army set off
for the north at a run.  They ran all day and most of the night, and it
was still dark when they fell on the main Trekker party.  The attack
was unexpected.  Men were disemboweled, women mutilated, and the brains
of small children dashed out on wagon wheels.  In all, 530 Trekkers
died that dawn, in a place we still call Weenen the Place of Weeping.

In the aftermath, the survivors drew their wagons into a circle on the
bank of a nameless river and made ready for the final battle.  On its
eve, they laid hands on the Bible and swore a covenant with Jehovah: If
he granted them victory over the heathen, they would hold true to his
ways forever.  A Malan was there Jacob Jacobus Malan, brother of the
fallen Hercules.  As the sun rose on December 16, he saw something
amazing: rank upon rank of Zulu warriors sitting silently on their
haunches, waiting for the mist to rise.

Two hours later, the river was red with black blood, and it was no
longer nameless: It was Blood Riven Mountains of Zulus lay dead on the
battlefield, but not a single Boer was slain.  It was surely a miracle,
a sign that God's will was ours.

So we remember Jacob Jacobus Malan and' still honor his solemn
covenant. We also remember his sons Jacobus and Hercules, who survived
the Zulu wars, dragged their covered wagons over the mountains, and
smashed the black tribes on the high plain.  There, on conquered land,
they established Boer republics, where white men were free to rule
blacks in accord with their stern Jehovistic covenant.

In 1881, Hercules Malan the second sat on an African hilltop watching
another seminal event in the white tribe's bloody saga the Battle of
Majuba, turning point in our first war against the British.  Kommandant
Malan's soldiers were an undisciplined rabble of farm boys and
graybeards, but they could drop a buck at a thousand yards, and every
bullet counted.  The redcoats were annihilated, and the British retired
to lick their wounds.  A few years later, however, gold was discovered
on our land, and they came after us in earnest.

In that next war the Second War of Freedom our forces were outnumbered
nine to one.  The largest army yet assembled on the planet rolled
across our frontiers and occupied our towns.  We fought on, though.  A
Malan was there, too:

General Wynand Malan, the bravest of the brave, leader of a guerilla
band that ranged deep into enemy territory.

crush our resistance, the British scorched the earth and put Afrikaner
women and children in concentration camps, but General Malan fought on
to the bittersweet end, taking a bullet on the war's very last day.

In the aftermath, we became a backward peasantry, despised by our
British bosses and betters.  But we rose again, with yet another Malan
at the fore Daniel Franqois Malan.

His Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948, vowing to throw off
the imperial British yoke and devise a final solution for the 'native
question."  This final solution was apartheid, a gridlock of more than
a hundred laws designed to keep blacks and whites forever separate and
to ensure, not at all coincidentally, that blacks remained in their
Godordained place, hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and
ever.

This fate was unacceptable to blacks, so they rose against us in
earnest in 1976, in a rebellion that has never really ceased since.  In
this era, too, the destiny of the tribe is in the hands of a Malan
General Magnus Malan, minister of defense.  There are those who say it
is he who truly controls the country, through the awesome power of the
white military establishment.  In these troubled times, the name Malan
is often heard on the lips of black comrades, in the chanted litany of
those who will die when the day comes.  I see them at the township
rallies, thousands upon thousands of them, running to and fro in tight
formation.  Their feet thunder in unison.  Their faces glisten with
sweat and excitement.  Dust rises.  They cradle imaginary AK-47s in
their arms, and chant, "Voetsek, Malan!"  Fuck off, Mal...