Rian Malan's book My Traitor's Heart is one of the most penetrating personal books ever written about this violent and troubled nation. The author, son of a prominent Afrikaner family and grandnephew of one of the architects of apartheid, grows up in the suburbs and rebels against his parent's racism. Seeing himself as a "Just White Man," he becomes a crime reporter for a Johannesburg newspaper. Malan flees the military draft in 1977 but returns to his native country in 1985 to "seek a resolution to the paradox of my South African life in tales of the way we killed one another."
Malan reports on the chilling murder of blacks by racists and includes a lengthy consideration of a Zulu murderer who dispatched whites with a hammer. Squaring off against his own racial paranoia, the author becomes more fearful when he realizes the extent of black violence against blacks in warfare between rival factions or tribes. "Rural barbarities and absurd ideologies" have turned South Africa into a gigantic killing ground.
This book is a riveting and harrowing read. Most of it has the starkness, primitive energy, and violence of the Old Testament. In the final pages, Malan offers a New Testament-like sprig of hope when he concludes: "Either we stayed as we were, trapped inside our fortress of paranoia, deformed by fear and greed, or we opened the door to Africa and set forth into the unknown." Rian Malan's internal trek toward his own prejudice becomes an outward journey revealing the vast forces of evil afoot in contemporary South Africa and the resulting challenges facing its people.