Heir
Intimate portrait of South African racial reckoning
Eve Fairbanks
399 pages. Simon & Schuster. $ 27.99.
It was nothing more than a miracle — it was taught by South African schoolchildren in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected president in the country’s first fully democratic election. Apartheid, a brutal system of white minority rule that has made South Africa a global Pariah state, is over. The miracle was “mathematical and amazing, but controversial,” as Eve Fairbanks wrote in her new book, The Inheritors, about decades before and after the transition. There was not”.
But Malaika, one of the central figures in this account, remembers that the teacher’s soaring words didn’t seem to exactly match what she had endured in her daily life. Born a few years before apartheid ended, she continued to live in a hut in Soweto, a black town on the outskirts of Johannesburg. She and her mother, Dipuo, were still poor. They still had a hungry day. When Malaika was 11, her mother sent her to a school in her neighborhood, formerly white. Malaika only wore old shoes with holes in her bottom. “Make the top shine,” her grandmother will tell her. “People can’t see under your shoes.”
Others may not have seen it, but Malaika could certainly feel it. And how people feel is an essential part of the Fairbanks book. It took her more than a dozen years to report and write. The “Heirs” tell the story of South Africa, primarily through the experience of Malaika and Dipuo, with Christ, a white lawyer who worked as a soldier as a young recruit before the apartheid administration collapsed.
Fairbanks is a writer who is too good to rely on rough psychology, but repeatedly suggests that if you try to ignore how people see your situation, you should pay a terrible price. All the undeniable material facts that occur to them are often inseparable from emotional reality.
Fairbanks grew up in Virginia and moved to South Africa as an adult in 2009. She wrote as both an insider and an outsider and has spent years listening to the stories of the people she meets. Glide for the prejudices they take for granted.
For example, the word “they”: When she first arrived, Fairbanks was surprised to hear how many white South Africans used the word as a black catch-all. She called her angry when one of her friends, a “left-wing political activist,” had her car stolen by a stranger, but she was still “they.” Recall that he claimed to have done so. He seemed confused when Fairbanks imposed his presumption.
She saw a country highly transformed by apartheid, and after that, when blacks treated them with forgiveness instead of the vengeful retaliation they were conditioned on. Some whites felt it unbearable. “Things worked better than almost every white man had imagined,” writes Fairbanks. Even Christ, who was first confronted with terrorism charges for accidentally killing a homeless black man on a mission, saw his past as “cleaned.” He may think he appreciates such mercy, but he argued that it was a “subtle deterioration.” Fairbanks explains that Christ wanted to believe he was hated:
This “mirror of elegance” was not of particular interest to Malaika. In college, she started writing a bitter essay on Facebook. And it was enthusiastically received by the white elite she criticized most persistently. She was confused and indignant. She yelled, “Celebrating their own willingness to punch” about how flashy some whites like to show off their generosity.
Fairbanks tells these stories against the greater background of a changing country, including land reform, the AIDS crisis, corruption and economic problems. Malaika and Dipuo felt disappointed with Mandela and the African National Congress. Their post-apartheid economic policy was biased towards soothing the clever international market, rather than enacting the redistribution that former activist Dipuo wanted. She remembers being struck by Mandela’s “troublesome and patronizing turn” towards some sort of fine politics. He repeatedly lectured black South Africans on their responsibility to reassure whites.
Fairbanks noticed the end of the book as a collective hardening as a younger generation of white supremacists shamelessly wore victim cloaks and presented Afrikaners as “endangered minorities.” Is. Fairbanks states that this type of provocation is a collaborative attempt to anger and “anger” black South Africans. Afrikaner trolling may already be influential. Malaika told Fairbanks about a friend who had radicalized to the point that “I don’t believe whites have human abilities.” Malaika, who is still keenly critical of white South Africans, admits that her friend’s anger “scared me even.”
In addition to being an elegant writer, Fairbanks is definitely sympathetic. I wondered at some nasty analogies, like when she recalled a discussion with her ex-boyfriend to remind her of her psychodynamics she was observing in South Africa after apartheid. Bring out intertwined emotions with moderate skill and sensitivity. The echo she finds in the current American situation is more resonating. There are multiple calculations done at the same time, but in relatively slow motion. “South Africans never had the luxury of reaching out to the psychological cliffs of great change,” she writes. “In a blink of an eye, they were in it, counting votes.”