Love and Murder in South Africa

My first encounter with South Africa was a book, My Traitor’s Heart, which I read when I was twenty, and it was because of this book that I traveled to South Africa twenty years later. I don’t know where I thought I was going then, but it might have been further into the book, which was a reckoning with what it means to be white. The author, Rian Malan, is a white South African who worked as a crime reporter during the death throes of apartheid, and he told the story of his country through a series of murders.

South Africa had the world’s second-highest murder rate in 1990, when My Traitor’s Heart was published. Those were the days of burning tire necklaces and cursory executions. Murder in apartheid-era South Africa wasn’t like murder in other countries, according to Malan. “Elsewhere in the world, murder was just another function of ordinary social relationships,” he observed. “In the vast majority of cases, murderers killed someone they knew—wives, bosses, fellow drunkards, rivals in business or love. In South Africa, it wasn’t like that. In South Africa, you could be walking down the street, minding your own business, when white trash boiled off the back of a passing pick-up and kicked your head in, simply because your skin was black.” Re-reading that passage on the plane to Johannesburg, I could think of at least one other country where murder was like that, the only country I really knew. But when I read My Traitor’s Heart at twenty, it wasn’t the murders I recognized—it was the psychological state of the author.