Speaking the truth: life in post-apartheid SA seen through the eyes of ordinary people

NON-FICTION

Criteria:

The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning by Eve Fairbanks, (Jonathan Ball Publishers)

The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy. The book observes subtle truths about race and power that extend well beyond national borders.

Judges said: A work of incredible endeavour, more than a decade in the making, as Fairbanks traverses some of the greatest inflection points in post-apartheid South Africa and explores just how the fault lines of ethnicity and culture are driving us ever further apart.

We asked Eve Fairbanks a few questions about The Inheritors:

Where did the title “The Inheritors” come from? 

“The Inheritors” comes from a verse in the Bible, from Jeremiah: “My inheritance has become for me like a lion in the forest.” “A lion in the forest” is a majestic thing, but it is also a thing that has escaped and become at times invisible and unmanageable, even a danger. For me, the image captures the sense that something many people rightly thought was theirs — the new South Africa they fought hard for and won — then went on to have its own power, its own majestic, unpredictable and even dangerous life. And both its trajectory and its impact on any one individual personally is not entirely within that person’s control.

Were you nervous to write a book about South Africa as a white woman who grew up in Virginia? 

This book follows four South Africans — three black and one white. Many Europeans and Americans encouraged me to write only or mainly about the white South African, Christo, and his Afrikaner community — both as a way to acknowledge my limitations as a writer and because white people overseas love writing about “bad South African whites”. It makes them feel very self-righteous and progressive by comparison. It is daunting to write about a culture that isn’t your own, and there are extra complications when it comes to race. At points in the book, I report comments black South Africans made to me to the effect that I was getting it wrong, or that there wasn’t any way I’d be able to write adequately about their experiences, which is itself an experience reflected in the book. But I also think there are a lot of feelings South Africans are embarrassed to admit to each other — even to their loved ones in their own communities — which they felt were easier to say to an outsider. It also isn’t fair to anyone in South Africa to write about only one community in a vacuum. That is how apartheid treated South African communities — as able to be separated. Everyone’s lives, however, are so intertwined — their fates are intertwined in ways they choose and acknowledge, as well as in ways they don’t. Frankly, every longtime resident of Orania has an imaginary black person living rent-free as a huge presence in their heads. They wouldn’t live there if they didn’t! If I hadn’t written about things like that — the way we imagine each other — and then tried as hard as I possibly could, with all my limitations, to investigate and write about the reality, I wouldn’t have been respecting my positionality. I would have been failing to do a basic duty towards the truth.

It is an intensely intimate and revealing book. Was it difficult to write about Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, Christo and Elliot? 

There’s a theory that it’s most difficult to write about ourselves, and in some ways that’s true — we’ll never get a full perspective on ourselves in the same way we can’t see our own backs without a mirror. But I sometimes worry the contemporary culture has lost sight of how hard it is to write about other people, and how important it is for writers — whether professional or amateur — to write about others, as well as how hard it is for people to be written about by journalists. It is hugely daring to give even a short interview to a paper — a huge act of courage and faith. So I’m extraordinarily grateful to everyone in this book — the hundreds who spoke to me both using their names and anonymously — to help create as kaleidoscopic and rich a portrait as possible of their country. Our thoughts and our lives are ultimately our own, and it’s so vulnerable to share them. The main characters spoke to me for hundreds of hours, and I recorded almost all the interviews, so in a paradoxical sense I was less worried about representing them than I was about people with whom I had more fleeting encounters, because a great deal of the book is their words. To write the book, I went to as many places as possible with its main figures — for example, I saw the homes in which they grew up. I also visited the neighbourhoods in which Dipuo and Malaika spent time and saw the military bases (Oudtshoorn and the now-abandoned Pomfret) where Christo trained in the late 1980s. So I had an incredible amount of visual, olfactory and auditory material to put into words. But every single South African has his or her own South Africa. I also wrote about people I met at parties and at Checkers and on the street. They weren’t “extras” in the book, and I wanted to make sure I captured windows, even if tiny, on their worlds too. For instance, there’s a two-sentence description of a young woman’s time at Wits, and I went and visited the laboratory in which she worked, even though that’s only rendered in half a sentence.

Did researching and writing the book change your perception of yourself?

It definitely changed my perception of my own country. I believe the country with the closest parallels to South African history, though they are in no way complete, is the US. This isn’t just a parochial American speaking who sees America in every part of the world — it’s really true! And studying and writing about South Africa and South Africans made me realise how ungrateful, and even lazy, Americans are, though that may sound like an odd thing to say. Americans often believe they are stuck forever in a certain narrative or understanding of their problems. South Africans saw in somewhat similar problems completely different opportunities and ways to solve them, and this made me realise how behind we are as Americans, and lacking in inventiveness, as well as how much we have to learn from South Africans when it comes to diversity, integration and grappling with serious cultural and economic conundrums. We’re really lagging behind.

How do you think your book “illuminates truthfulness”?

Truth is the space between what different people believe to be the truth. It is the space between different people’s claims. Sometimes it’s far closer to one person’s claim than another. But it’s always a space rather than a single point. This book creates a space between multiple ideas of South Africa — the different characters’ ideas. But I also hope and believe it creates for the reader a space between his or her idea of the country and even the characters’ and mine — the non-South African author — and that this space creates room for truth to expand and breathe and be its fuller shifting, moving self. I never mind if readers take something different from the book and its characters than I believed I meant when I wrote it. The more they do that, the more they fill out their own opinion and imagination of the world I built and make a different home in it, the more it will establish a platform for truth to emerge instead of [others merely] preaching it.