At age 20, while beginning to form her worldview and her politics, Eula Biss read the book, “My Traitor’s Heart” by Rian Milan, a young white Afrikaner who “told the story of his country through a series of murders.” Twenty years later, Biss traveled to South Africa for the first time. At first, she’s surprised by all she did not understand about Black living conditions under Apartheid, realizing that her only guide up until that point—the author Milan—was hopelessly myopic as a member of the ruling whites.
The young Rian Malan opposed apartheid, but not in any way that he would later consider meaningful. “We believed that apartheid was stupid and vicious,” he wrote of himself and his teenage friends, “but we also believed that growing our hair long undermined it.” He and his friends spray-painted SAY IT LOUD, I’M BLACK & I’M PROUD in six-foot letters on an embankment in their suburb, and Malan showed a photo to his family’s black maid. Her response: “Ah, suka.” Get lost. Malan had never heard the James Brown song, but he’d read about it in Time. He knew more about American culture than he knew about the culture of the people who lived in his backyard, in shacks. “The strangest thing about my African childhood,” he wrote, “is that it wasn’t really African at all.” Malan was more Western than he was African—because he was, more than anything, a product of apartheid.
At twenty, I recognized myself in the young Malan. I saw my own undeveloped politics, my own failings and my own frustrations, my own crisis of conscience. I saw the deficiencies in my education, which was, in many ways, an apartheid education. I had been fed mostly platitudes about race in America and I was hungry for real talk, so I was drawn to Malan’s impatience with empty gestures and his intolerance of pious pronouncements.
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