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A review by juliechristinejohnson
A Dry White Season by André Brink
4.0
I was introduced to the dream and nightmare that was South Africa around the same time A Dry White Season was published: 1979. I was ten, a 5th grader in an isolated, rural western Washington town. Perhaps it wasn't a coincidence, for A Dry White Season was a bestseller upon publication in the United States, but I recall our class watching a cartoon film of black African children, each drawn with tight black curls and toasted almond skin, holding hands and singing as they paraded through streets made of simple gray lines. The words they sang never left me: "We are marching to Pretoria. We are marching to Pretoria, Pretoria, Pretoria. We are marching to Pretoria Pretoria, Hooorah!"
Of course, it would be years, decades, before the irony of those lyrics hit me. What that film was, why it was shown in our classroom, why we learned the lyrics to British military marching song (or a Boer independence marching song, or an American Civil War marching song-for all are claimed as the song's origins) are mysteries never to be solved. I can only assume my teacher hopped on the same bus as The Weavers, who sang the song for years without bothering to learn what it was about, and once they did, turned it into a protest song.
But of course, it's easy to protest another country's political tyranny with folk songs from thousands of miles distant, when it isn't your life on the edge, when you don't risk family, job, property or your life to stand up and do the right thing. For Ben Du Toit, a white schoolteacher in Johannesburg, doing the right thing never occurred to him, until suddenly it became the reason for his existence.
As this story unfolds in the late 1970s, apartheid is the accepted way of life. Blacks are segregated in township ghettos, a condition Afrikaners and other white South Africans treat with reactions ranging from mild concern to dogmatic approval. But nearly all are oblivious to the effect racial segregation, injustice and abuse has on the human beings who clean their homes, tend their gardens, and who are disappeared by the authorities for crimes real and, mostly, imagined. It isn't until Gordon, a janitor at Ben's school, pleads for his help in locating Gordon's missing son that Ben wakes up to the reality around him. Ben follows protocol, solicits an attorney, and restricts himself to the usual channels of inquiry. At least in the beginning. When Gordon is detained by the police, Ben is drawn into a much darker drama, beyond the borders of his reasonable, tidy life.
This is a political story. Ben remains something of a cipher- a mild-mannered, oddly passive husband, father, teacher, who is motivated not so much by affection or concern for Gordon and his family, but by a blossoming sense of social justice. In that, this is not so much the story of a man, but of a nation of men. It is no surprise that
A Dry White Season was banned in South Africa soon after its publication there, for it is a strident call to action by a white man to his fellow white citizens. It is an appeal to resist, defy, expose, even when fighting back seems futile agains the might of a wealthy, armed regime. It is the shedding of ignorance, innocence, passivity. It is a story of betrayals and loss, of courage.
There are some awkward stylistic choices-insertions of Ben's diary that seem to want to lend more humanity and color to an otherwise monochromatic personality-but the prose is refined and confident and careful. I squirmed a few times at the drifting of Ben's narrative toward the White Savior, but I wonder how much of that is my own baggage and an armchair reflection of this history, nearly forty years later.
I am so glad to have read this book, a classic indictment of apartheid that has not lost its power or relevance in a time when race dominates our national conversation and international imperatives.
Of course, it would be years, decades, before the irony of those lyrics hit me. What that film was, why it was shown in our classroom, why we learned the lyrics to British military marching song (or a Boer independence marching song, or an American Civil War marching song-for all are claimed as the song's origins) are mysteries never to be solved. I can only assume my teacher hopped on the same bus as The Weavers, who sang the song for years without bothering to learn what it was about, and once they did, turned it into a protest song.
But of course, it's easy to protest another country's political tyranny with folk songs from thousands of miles distant, when it isn't your life on the edge, when you don't risk family, job, property or your life to stand up and do the right thing. For Ben Du Toit, a white schoolteacher in Johannesburg, doing the right thing never occurred to him, until suddenly it became the reason for his existence.
As this story unfolds in the late 1970s, apartheid is the accepted way of life. Blacks are segregated in township ghettos, a condition Afrikaners and other white South Africans treat with reactions ranging from mild concern to dogmatic approval. But nearly all are oblivious to the effect racial segregation, injustice and abuse has on the human beings who clean their homes, tend their gardens, and who are disappeared by the authorities for crimes real and, mostly, imagined. It isn't until Gordon, a janitor at Ben's school, pleads for his help in locating Gordon's missing son that Ben wakes up to the reality around him. Ben follows protocol, solicits an attorney, and restricts himself to the usual channels of inquiry. At least in the beginning. When Gordon is detained by the police, Ben is drawn into a much darker drama, beyond the borders of his reasonable, tidy life.
This is a political story. Ben remains something of a cipher- a mild-mannered, oddly passive husband, father, teacher, who is motivated not so much by affection or concern for Gordon and his family, but by a blossoming sense of social justice. In that, this is not so much the story of a man, but of a nation of men. It is no surprise that
A Dry White Season was banned in South Africa soon after its publication there, for it is a strident call to action by a white man to his fellow white citizens. It is an appeal to resist, defy, expose, even when fighting back seems futile agains the might of a wealthy, armed regime. It is the shedding of ignorance, innocence, passivity. It is a story of betrayals and loss, of courage.
There are some awkward stylistic choices-insertions of Ben's diary that seem to want to lend more humanity and color to an otherwise monochromatic personality-but the prose is refined and confident and careful. I squirmed a few times at the drifting of Ben's narrative toward the White Savior, but I wonder how much of that is my own baggage and an armchair reflection of this history, nearly forty years later.
I am so glad to have read this book, a classic indictment of apartheid that has not lost its power or relevance in a time when race dominates our national conversation and international imperatives.