My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience

Rian Malan

mar 2012 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

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An essay collection that offers “a fascinating glimpse of post-apartheid South Africa” from the bestselling author of My Traitor’s Heart (The Sunday Times).
 
The Lion Sleeps Tonight is Rian Malan’s remarkable chronicle of South Africa’s halting steps and missteps, taken as blacks and whites try to build a new country. In the title story, Malan investigates the provenance of the world-famous song, recorded by Pete Seeger and REM among many others, which Malan traces back to a Zulu singer named Solomon Linda. He follows the trial of Winnie Mandela; he writes about the last Afrikaner, an old Boer woman who settled on the slopes of Mount Meru; he plunges into President Mbeki’s AIDS policies of the 1990s; and finally he tells the story of the Alcock brothers (sons of Neil and Creina whose heartbreaking story was told in My Traitor’s Heart), two white South Africans raised among the Zulu and fluent in their language and customs.
 
The twenty-one essays collected here, combined with Malan’s sardonic interstitial commentary, offer a brilliantly observed portrait of contemporary South Africa; “a grimly realistic picture of a nation clinging desperately to hope” (The Guardian).

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“A tremendous book about candor, honor, and race, a witness-bearing act of the rarest courage. No one who reads it could ever forget it.” —Michael Herr

“Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. 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 Carré

“Malan is bent on uncovering another level altogether of South African life, and he does so beautifully. . . . He sharply expands our understanding of his strange, strange country’s complexities.” —William Finnegan, The New York Times

“My Traitor’s Heart grips you by the throat and won’t let go.” —Peter Gorner, The Chicago Tribune

“A passionate, blazingly honest testament . . . Those who read it will never again see South Africa in quite the same way.” —Christopher Hope, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A book that is part investigative reportage, part personal confession, and in all respects remarkable. . . . Penetrating, comprehensive, and—in its relentless accumulation of ghastly detail—heartbreaking.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

“Here, as in nothing I’ve read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa. . . . Triumphant.” —Salman Rushdie

“…an unflinching and intimate story of a man fighting against injustice in his homeland, even as he must come to terms with his own family’s poisonous role there.” —Austin Merrill, Vanity Fair