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HAPPY SAD LAND (1994)
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This was my first book, commissioned by a
publisher who had turned down a novel I had written. He liked
my writing style, he said, if not my story. In any case, he
published more travel than literary fiction. Did I have any
ideas for a travel book?
As it happened, I had. In 1977, in a 'gap year' between school
and university, I had worked as a 'teacher-aid' in a secondary
school in the newly independent Botswana. Like many other young
Europeans before me, I had fallen in love with Africa: the heat,
the wide emptiness of the bush, the kaleidoscopic sunsets, above
all the people. Their ebullience and good humour was such a
contrast to the grumble-culture of home.
Botswana is adjacent to South Africa,
and at that time, the cruel and absurd experiment of apartheid
was in full swing. In Gaberone, a few miles from the border,
we felt the effects. Refugees of the system, black and white,
gathered in the little capital. Some of the black teenagers
I was teaching were from South Africa. Bantu education meant
that there were no schools in their home country where they
could get a proper secondary education. The fortunate few, often
the children of prosperous or significant black South Africans,
were sent abroad: to Waterford in Swaziland (which was attended
by Nelson Mandela's children); now to Maru-a-Pula, our school.
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Women at Coffee
Bay, Transkei
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I was intrigued enough by the idea of what
lay over the border to take off in the school holidays and hitchhike
round South Africa. I saw segregated buses and bars - even benches
- and got lifts from blacks in lorries and whites in cars. The
whites were generally elaborately defensive of their pariah
system. Every lift involved a lecture (often accompanied by
the sound of Neil Diamond, white South Africa's favourite singer
at that time).
The experience remained with me.
And when Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson asked where I'd like
to write about, it had to be Southern Africa. As I landed in
Cape Town and travelled up the coast, moving back and forth
between prosperous white neighbourhoods and desperately poor
black townships, I was under the impression that I was describing
a situation that would still be much the same when my book came
out. The people I talked to, both black and white, predicted
that apartheid would continue in some form for several years
longer. But history was on the gallop. By the time I handed
in the manuscript, nine months after I'd returned, the date
had been set for democratic elections. When the book was published,
my description of the country and its people was history.
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Township children,
Soweto-on-Sea
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When I open Happy Sad Land now I have mixed
feelings. I was trying to combine the first-person episodic
narrative of a conventional travel book with detailed interviews
about the political situation and I'm not sure the experiment
entirely works. On the other hand, I hope the book succeeds
in its attempt to describe how ordinary people live through
an extraordinary situation. I very much doubt that any news-chasing
foreign correspondent covering that turbulent transition would
have come across the local human stories I stumbled on: the
wealthy white boutique owner who rescued the murdered township
leader's wife and children at the height of a riot (see extract);
the old gold-diggers still living by pre-apartheid rules in
the valleys of the Transvaal; the Jo'burg radical who worked
for the ANC but nonetheless argued that black and white were
as different as two species of animal; the AWB man who had a
home-video of his onetime friend Eugene Terre'Blanche with his
mistress Jani Allen, but had let his children video a Mickey
Mouse film over it ... to name but four. |
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