EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | Responses to ‘The Inheritors’ illuminate our choking differences

Often our responses to a book reveal more about ourselves than about the book and its author. Early responses to Eve Fairbanks' already award-winning The Inheritors is an excellent case in point. It is worth carefully engaging this important text, as a self-standing literary exercise, but also doing so by paying attention to the multiple readings of it that have already emerged.  

The core of The Inheritors tells the stories of Dipuo and her daughter, Malaika, and also that of an Afrikaner, Christo. Christo had been a soldier during apartheid and had emerged on the other side of the democratic breakthrough with a murderous moral sin for which he did not face retribution. He ended up at a university campus riven with a history of racism, an institution that typified the apartheid regime's desperation to construct, in part, an intellectual foundation for white supremacy, with appeals to warped, racist, theological hermeneutics.  

The higher education sector in South Africa is therefore a crucial site of analysis for understanding both the making and nurturing of the apartheid project, as well as efforts to deal decisively (but with little success thus far) with the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Christo's biography — an unlikely mentor to young Afrikaans white men who had inherited racism that is passed down intergenerationally — is squarely located within these larger historical movements and structures.  

Dipuo is a very different protagonist. She is a black woman from Soweto who played an important micro-role in the fight against apartheid as a community organiser, particularly active during the 1980s. Like black women everywhere, she experiences misogynoir, the toxic combination of misogyny and racism. Misogynoir is tied up, structurally, with racial capitalism, and so the detailed stories that Fairbanks records about the lived experiences of Dipuo, are in the end a powerful collection of vignettes that also show us the impact of these multiple struggles playing out on the emotional landscape of Dipuo. Being, like all of us, only human, it is not altogether a shock to see how Dipuo's life begins to break down in the grip of economic disempowerment, a trigger for mental ill-health.  

Malaika was born in 1991, of a generation that many might have predicted would be the first inheritors of both political and economic freedom. Her mom's generation had hoped for a future South Africa in which the sacrifices of yesteryear would find expression in the lives of the so-called born-frees. But of course, painfully so, that has turned out not to be the case. Malaika grew up in a shack, under conditions of material deprivation, and only due to her struggling mom's sacrifices, combined with her own academic prowess that led to some teachers looking out for her, did she get bussed off to a well-resourced, former whites-only school in the suburbs.

Many of us learnt to either conform or to suffer the ignominy of being seen as troublesome for raising critical questions about exclusionary norms that were taken as cast in stone.

However, as was the case for many of us who first experienced racially integrated schooling, we quietly carried with us an accumulation of jarring experiences we did not have the space, power or even linguistic frameworks to name and explain fully. There was casual and institutional racism, and since the institutional culture and identities were offered to us to opt into rather than to critically re-work and mould into new institutions speaking to a radically different new social and political milieu, many of us learnt to either conform or to suffer the ignominy of being seen as troublesome for raising critical questions about exclusionary norms that were taken as cast in stone. Malaika, with a sharp political instinct, becomes a crucial protagonist in The Inheritors because we get to understand the justified rage of many younger South Africans who navigate spaces that remain unjust.  

Fairbanks took a decision to focus as dispassionately as possible on the particular rather than on the general. This is an interesting way, as Wamuwi Mbao correctly points out, to make history come alive. It is in contrast to doing an empirical data dump on the reader. It is not the only way to chronicle history. It is also not without a combination of upsides and downsides.  

But a careful reader should, in my mind, appreciate authorial intentions. That is not an excuse for an author to fail to deal — or to deal inadequately — with salient parts of a history they are telling that the kind of particularism I am alluding to, cannot allow for. But to be a good reader, if such a thing can be invented, is surely in part to be a reader who first asks, “What is the aim of this project?” rather than to trot out, in the first place, a shopping list of attempted quick put-downs, like an overzealous school debater might.  

One of the best early reviews is by excellent fellow author Sisonke Msimang. She does wrestle, generously, with what Fairbanks wishes to achieve with this project. She praises Fairbanks, to take just one example, for showing astuteness in how she draws on research that shows that Afrikaners’ “greatest grievance was a feeling of superfluousness”.  

Nevertheless, she criticises her along several lines. Two criticisms are worth debating. Sometimes, argues Msimang, Fairbanks also romanticises, to the point of falsehood, what black life was like under apartheid. Fairbanks says at several points in the book that she had encountered a refusal by black interlocutors, like Dipuo, to focus on the banalities of everyday life, such as romantic love, while apartheid was still not defeated. Fairbanks supplements this story with one about Govan Mbeki, shortly after his release from prison, remarking on the fact that his son, Thabo, was a comrade of his (as opposed to, most obviously, primarily his son). Here the implication is that even familial relationships were subordinated to political ones.  

I asked Fairbanks, when I anchored her book launch in Johannesburg, to respond to Msimang's critical observation, and the essence of Fairbanks' response was that she merely faithfully recorded what she was told by the particular people whose lives she had chronicled in The Inheritors. I don't find that response cogent and am in agreement with Msimang. 

Jacob Dlamini's first book, Native Nostalgia, was infamously misread (or rather not read at all) by someone who wrote a column in which he assumed the book he had not read is nostalgia for apartheid. Actually, the stories of life in a Johannesburg township in the 1980s that Dlamini wrote about in Native Nostalgia are a big “f*** you!” to apartheid. Dlamini shows how our black parents, and us children, could be immersed in the banalities of life, and in social games, despite the crime against humanity within which we were embedded.  

His book was and is a celebration of black humanity refusing to be extinguished even in the grip of political evil. Of course we gossiped and played games and dated and made love and married and got divorced and so on because our lives were not only political despite the evil wishes of the architects of apartheid.

You have a duty as a journalist and author to make sure that the particular is not left to imply a hasty generalisation.

The limits of strictly being a generous stenographer for the subjects you follow, come into play here. Fairbanks, whom I have known for some ten years, is far too brilliant to believe, upon reflection, her extemporaneous response to me at her book launch, even if she was sincere in the moment. You have a duty as a journalist and author to make sure the particular is not left to imply a hasty generalisation. That implication may not be present in formal logical terms but in the sense that a reader may reasonably imagine the life of the protagonist to typify black life. 

You don't have to be unfaithful to your interviewee nor slide towards a full-blown polemic about your interviewee's remarks at every turn. But key responses from subjects need to be engaged. Msimang was correct, in my view, to pause over this example as one that cried out for the author to make it clear that black life was not wholly immersed in the sole project of blowing up substations. Black life was always irreducibly complex. The 1980s was no exception.  

At other times, I do not wholly agree with Msimang. We had a long debate about whether The Inheritors does enough to explain the structural injustices of South Africa. We agree that aspects of the political economy, structural violence, even crucial aspects of how history got us here, are absent from The Inheritors. Only now, however, do I accept a reasonable response from Fairbanks on this point, that her book, like any book on issues of race, justice and the structural conditions of a contemporary society, cannot even pretend to the final word — let alone a total take — on all elements that require close examination in a larger project of critical examination of societal woes. Fairbanks isn't an economist nor a political analyst, and as a reader I personally am satisfied with accepting her project to be one of particularism rather than top-down structural analysis about the state of the nation.  

Msimang reveals how we read books (and this is perfectly regular) through our own experiences, and our particular political and intellectual lenses. The same is true of writer Rian Malan. Whereas, for example, both Msimang and myself were concerned about black agency being diminished unwittingly by Fairbanks every now and then, Malan starts off with a decent exposition of the Fairbanks project but ends up scolding her for apparently being seduced by Malaika and for blaming all that is wrong with South Africa on white people, who come out as beyond the pale in The Inheritors. Simmering below his excellent control of language is seething white anger. 

By the end of his essay I felt that Malan, frankly, is beyond the pale. Fairbanks is generous in her attempt to understand Christo and his family. She does psycho-political work that very few black researchers or progressive white allies would. She observes closely. She listens generously. She spends time — years — to move from a temptation to reproduce stereotypes about white Afrikaans men to making sense of their inner lives, and how they feel about and situate themselves within democratic South Africa. If anything, some black readers may wonder if Fairbanks should not have been more normative or evaluative of the beliefs, biography and current life of Christo and others. Indeed, much of what Msimang and myself wrestled with ultimately stems from the depth of generosity Fairbanks shows white South Africans. Malan, averse to putting whiteness on trial, misses this wholesale.  

Malan’s response typifies a laziness among many white South Africans to take a text like The Inheritors as a starting point for grappling with what it means to be implicated in the twin histories of colonialism and apartheid.   

We certainly will not even begin to approximate a just South Africa in which we all live meaningful lives, not overdetermined by racism, until we enter discussion about the past without defensiveness and without a willingness to listen deeply to those whose lives are very different to our own.