“The Promise” by Damon Galgut

This novel is framed by four funerals involving a rural South African family from outside Pretoria, the Swarts, spanning the end of Apartheid. “We are the last outpost on this continent . . . If South Africa falls, Moscow will be drinking champagne . . . Let’s be clear about it, majority rule means communism…. My people are a valiant, durable bunch, they outlasted the British and they will outlast the kaffirs too. Afrikaners are a nation apart…. Don’t look at the house, think about the land. Useless ground, full of stones, you can do nothing with it. But it belongs to our family, nobody else, and there’s power in that.” The issue of land, ownership, and title will play a recurring role in Galgut’s novel. “This one has been working here for ever, since Anton was born. The things she must’ve seen and heard! It’s because they’re always around, like ghosts, you almost don’t notice them. But it’s a mistake to think the same applies in reverse, they’re always watching and listening, helping themselves and each other. They know all your secrets, everything about you, even the things other white people don’t know. The stains in your underwear, the holes in your socks. You have to get rid of them before they start to scheme.” Throughout the story, race is, obviously, the elephant in every room. “Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!” Sport is the one thing that glues the new country together. “Boks versus the All Blacks, the eyes of other nations gazing hotly at us…. Even those who don’t like rugby, owing to whatever deficiency in their characters, are watching today…. When Mandela appears in the green Springbok rugby jersey to give the cup to Francois Pienaar, well, that’s something. That’s religious. The beefy Boer and the old terrorist shaking hands. Who could ever. My goodness.” In the end, however, this novel is also a story about a family just trying to endure and survive. “Once more, in the church, all of us, against our will. Times like these when the clan thickens, in numbers if not in loyalty, eyeing one another from our foxholes. The Swarts sticking together, mostly, though we’ve thinned out a lot by now, just a row of us in the first pew…. There is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak…. But enough, we are the rainbow nation, which is to say it’s a mixed and motley and mongrel assembly in the church today.”