Red Dust
Gillian Slovo
340pp, Virago
£15.99
Buy it at BOL
What was it about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that so captured collective imaginations far beyond South Africa itself? Previous similar exercises, in Uganda and Argentina for instance, produced no such worldwide echo. But South Africa's transformation at the end of apartheid became everyone's favourite fairy tale, with Nelson Mandela as the fairy godfather and the TRC as the magic wand that could right the wrongs of the past.
Close up, the TRC was less a fairy tale than a nightmare, as Gillian Slovo's Red Dust memorably reveals. The truth is elusive, reconciliation rare and the natural hunger for justice unassuaged. The poet Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull was a stark account of her unbearable months following the progress of the TRC hearings as a radio journalist. Her book, like the hearings themselves, leaves you stunned by the sheer quantity of naked pain. I was working on a factual account of the TRC myself when Gillian Slovo showed me early sections of this book, and it made me realise that only fiction could tell this story in all its ambiguity.
This is a beautifully written novel, with the pace and twists of a thriller and the atmosphere, scents and space of Africa. Slovo has drawn a cast so vivid that these torturers, heroes and victims will live in your mind long after the book is closed. She explores her themes of betrayal, collusion, the settling of scores and the elusiveness of memory through the eyes of each of her central five characters in turn; the result is a constant shift in the reader's perception of both character and truth.
Like Michael Ondaatje in Anil's Ghost , the story of Sri Lanka's killing fields, Slovo uses the device of the outsider returning to a small world left long ago for the opportunity and anonymity of the United States. Sarah Barcant is a successful New York prosecutor; Smitsrivier is provincial South Africa in microcosm. She comes back at the request of her one-time mentor, Ben Hoffman, the town's flamboyant liberal lawyer. Ben is slowly dying and needs her help with one last case - finding the body of Steve Sizela, son of the town's respected headmaster.
Steve's friend Alex Mpondo also comes back for the TRC; like Sarah, he is tugged by a web of obligation from the past. Now an MP, he is to be the key witness at the TRC hearing of an ex-policeman who is applying for amnesty for several crimes, one of which is the torture of Alex Mpondo.
But Alex has survived by forgetting and, like his old enemies the policemen, he does not want to change. "He had put Steve out of his mind, buried him as surely as Steve himself had been buried ... Sometimes looking around parliament at the other survivors of those terrible years, Alex thought that what they had in common was not just their shared suffering but the manner in which they had all been forced to keep their humanity by generalising it ... the collective had become more important than the individual - it was one way of surviving all that pain."
Tension is sharp between Alex and Sarah, as she fails to understand how much he literally cannot remember, and the prosecutor's skills of which she is so proud appear useless. She is baffled, too, by the bond revealed between Alex and his torturer as the two face each other at the hearing.
At the heart of this compelling novel is the painful revelation that there is never going to be a truth that these contradictory, fascinating characters can all recognise. Unspoken, ambiguous ties of loyalty and betrayal stain each one of them. And Alex, glamorous and exciting on the surface, who survived police torture only to be tortured anew by the belief that he betrayed Steve, is an all too recognisable face of the new South Africa.
