Story of a small-town murder trial breaks it to you not so gently

Apartheid was always going to take longer to die in SA’s small towns than in the big cities. In the early magical years of Nelson Mandela’s presidency, every few months I would drive an hour and a half southwest of Johannesburg to a farming dorp called Koppies to chronicle the dismantling of white rule.

For the first year or so of the “new” SA, change was in the air. A fledgling black middle class moved from the satellite township into town. I saw the election of the first black mayor. But reform slowed and the can-do spirit curdled. It would be wrong to say there was no progress, but fundamentally the two communities remained divided — by economics, history and race.

I was taken straight back to those initially uplifting but ultimately dispiriting trips on reading Andrew Harding’s remarkable new book. Set in the small town of Parys, about 40km northwest of Koppies, it is billed on the dust jacket as “the trial that broke a South African town”. It is indeed the story of a community riven by a horrific crime, but it is also far more than that: it is one of the finest, starkest and most minutely observed accounts of race relations in postapartheid SA yet.

These Are Not Gentle People is focused on the terrible events of a January evening in 2016, in a field just outside Parys, a pretty platteland town where the politics are as parched as the surrounding terrain. A crowd of white farmers had cornered two black men after being alerted that an elderly nearby farmer had been attacked.

It is inspiring to read an old-style BBC non-interventionist story in which the narrator has spoken to the lead characters and lets them do the telling.

Their accounts of what happened next vary dramatically. What is not in dispute, however, is that many of the crowd subjected the two men to a brutal assault, and that the two victims died in hospital within 24 hours. It is in the immediate aftermath of this hideous saga that Harding, the BBC’s veteran Africa correspondent, picks up his story.

At its heart, Harding’s is a vintage crime story. His narrative is of the tortuous and flawed investigation and trial, which only reached its close in May. It is an extraordinary tale in its own right. Harding introduces us to a kaleidoscopic cast of characters: defence lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates, police, activists and farmers.

They are neither caricatures nor archetypes. They are all confronting the same dilemmas shared by people everywhere, every day over family, career, ambition, loyalty and more — only in SA they take place against a backdrop of a poisoned history, entrenched racism, populist politics and murderous crime.

Harding’s depiction of these support roles is striking enough. Who could not be moved by the story of the young Indian female magistrate in the small town facing prejudice on all sides in the very province where under apartheid Indians were banned from residing?

But it’s Harding’s telling of the victims’ and perpetrators’ stories that lifts this account into the top rank. His lead characters are the relatives of one of the victims, Samuel Tjixa, and the Van der Westhuizens, an Afrikaner farming family that spans generations, income groups and farms — and which split when some of them accepted a plea bargain and co-operated with the police. Somehow he persuaded them all to let him listen to them and present their perspective. Somehow he also managed to do this without allowing judgment to enter into his account.