Just Because: 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'

When I was a lowly copy editor at ~ was it the Herald? or California Magazine? anyway, one of the places where I once worked that have since folded ~ I would occasionally catch a glimpse of Rian Malan, a writer whose prose was, IMHO, so perfect that when it chanced to cross my desk, I knew I wouldn't have much to do but luxuriate and marvel. As enlightened and enlightening as his writing was, though, the man who produced it seemed to me to be sad and somehow haunted. I knew he was from South Africa and guessed that his past there may have had something to do with it, but that's about all I knew.
   Many years later, I heard that he had come out with a book. For me, the title pretty much explained it all ~ My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns To Face His Country, His Tribe and His Conscience. I was happily busy being a new mom at that point, and I never read it, but I heard it was good. The other day, I was in the library at UC Berkeley, and what did I catch a glimpse of as I perused the bookshelves but Malan's latest, The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Other Stories of Africa ~ and this time, I have time to read it. So, disclaimer: I have not yet finished the book, which is made up of individual essays written over the past several years. Still ...

PART ONE

POLITICS

THE LAST AFRIKANER

         The early 1990s was a time of agonizing crisis for Afrikaners. After 350 years in Africa, we'd come to the end of the line. Nelson Mandela was free, the country was burning, and President F.W. de Klerk was negotiating the terms of our surrender. Some Boers were willing to follow him into an uncertain African future. Others said, Over our dead bodies. It was in this climate of massive psychic dislocation that I stumbled upon the parable of Tannie Katrien, a little old lady whose experience defied at least some of our myths about darkest Africa.
   Once upon a time there was a British colonial family named Hartley who had a magical farm in Africa. It lay on the slopes of Mount Meru, a cool green island in a sea of sun-blasted yellow savannah. Twice a year, monsoon winds deposited heavy rains on Meru's leeward slopes, which were clad in dense rain forest, full of rhino and buffalo and elephant. Several swift, clear streams came tumbling out of the jungle and
meandered across a level plain where the soil was so rich and deep that anything you planted bore fruit in astonishing profusion—peaches, apricots, beans, maize, and the sun so close you got two harvests every year.
   The Hartleys bought this farm in 1953. Their homestead lay on the shoulder of the volcano, so high that it was often above the clouds. Sometimes they would wrap themselves in blankets at night and sit on the veranda with the clouds at their feet, watching the moon rise over the glittering summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, forty miles away. In the morning, it would be burning hot again, and you could sit on the same stoop with a pair of binoculars, tracking the movement of elephant herds across the parched plains far below. "I loved that thouse," Kim Hartley told me. "The veranda wa ninety-nine feet across. It had big white Cape Dutch gables, and the previous owner had left a portrait of Hitler in the cellar." I didn't have to ask who'd built it. It had to have been a Boer.
   ...