'An American did get shot a couple of days ago . . . but he doesn't really count'

A longtime fan of the controversial South African writer Rian Malan, EMMET MALONEset out to meet him face to face while in the country covering the World Cup for ' The Irish Times' – and eventually managed to track him down in Johannesburg

IT IS ALMOST 20 years since I read Rian Malan's wonderful exploration of life in apartheid South Africa, My Traitor's Heart, which Don DeLillo described as "a great swirling devil of a book", so I'm well acquainted with his ability to surprise. Still, I'm taken aback when, after asking how I might contact him, I'm told that he has reinvented himself as a Boer folk singer. A local reporter suggests trying an e-mail address that starts boerbull@, but after a couple of messages bounce back I assume I can't have been paying attention and take my chances on what seems the more logical "boerboel" instead. Then days pass during which I'm alarmed to read in the Spectatorthat the only impact the World Cup has had on Malan is to bring a stream of foreign journalists to his door, all wanting his take on the lie of the land. I fire off more e-mails in an attempt to bump my way up the queue. Days slip by until a polite reply comes from a woman who says that my one-sided correspondence has, in fact, been with a dog club in Western Cape.

Chastened, I make the additional effort to find a mobile-phone number for Malan, and things begin to move. He says to come to his house in Emmarentia, a middle-class suburb of Johannesburg where the roads are named after Scottish golf courses, and he drives us a couple of kilometres to a row of shops and restaurants where it turns out that the place he has in mind has shut down and his second choice doesn’t do lunch, so we end up in a good but noisy pizzeria around the corner.

Oddly, for someone who has complained about South Africa hosting the World Cup, he is more concerned about being able to watch the first half of the day’s quarter-final between Germany and Argentina than I am. The second half, he observes, will have to be missed, as one of the outlets for his musical interests, the Ensemble Borsalino, is playing a birthday party at the Rand Club. One website describes the group as a “Boer/Jew/Gypsy band”; Malan says they play “the music of people who feel they’re doomed but don’t give a damn any more”. I wonder if that really is the prevailing mood down at the Rand Club. Malan, in any case, certainly seems to retain the capacity to get angry about many things, not least what he sees as the relentlessly poor government of his homeland by “the brothers” who now rule.

As for the football, it seems that, like so many other locals, he has set aside his difficulties with the entire enterprise, at least for the duration of the tournament. “I’ve kind of enjoyed it,” he says with a sigh. “I mean, when the milk is spilled there’s no point crying over it, but it’s one f***ing expensive party, and we might as well enjoy it.” The amount of money that has been spent on hosting the World Cup still rankles, though, as does the pre-tournament preoccupation with violent crime in the country generally and Johannesburg in particular. “I’m happy that it’s gone well. It seems to me now that the worst thing we could have had was a cup that failed. And from an entirely unselfish point of view,” he adds mischievously, “it’s been extraordinarily good for the confidence of our leaders to have this opportunity to strut their stuff on the international stage.

“As for the crime,” he continues, “well, an American did get shot a couple of days ago, but he was a backpacker, and he wasn’t here for the World Cup, so he doesn’t really count.” I mention a claim in one newspaper that visitors have committed more offences against locals than the other way around, and he laughs. “That’s good. It’s a man-bites-dog story. I suppose you’ve got to hand it to the South African police: they devoted enormous resources and money to securing saturation policing at places where tourists hang out, around the stadiums, et cetera. The absence of crime against tourists at this World Cup has been a non-event for me on the scale of that Y2K hullabaloo. But then you have these idiots from the government saying that this shows South Africa is a safe country – and that, of course, is bullshit.”

A particular problem now, he says, is that tensions have been building in townships during the World Cup, with reports of foreign workers being warned that when the rich tourists go home there will be renewed bouts of xenophobic violence of the sort that left 62 people dead and caused major upheaval in 2008. The government and its local representatives have been keen to stress that they’ll maintain order, but Malan observes: “You can’t discount those possibilities; this is Africa, these things actually do happen.”

The South Africa he left for London in 1977, to avoid serving in its army, was a rather different place, one that had been shaped in no small part by his Afrikaner ancestors, who included Daniel François Malan, the first nationalist prime minister and an early architect of apartheid. Rian, he says, saw himself as coming more from the "dope-smoking Joburger" tradition, and after embracing punk rock in Britain he moved on to the US, where he worked as a music journalist. "I was working on the LA Weekly, where we were all leftists, believed in a certain cause and earned $75 a week, which was much less than I could have got washing dishes. But I woke up one morning and there were all these guys in pork-pie hats: Madness had arrived. One day they were all revolutionaries, the next they were rude boys and a little while after that they were New Romantics – at which point I decided that this wasn't such a serious business."

Changing tack, he uncovered the story of the early Malans in South Africa: Jacques Malan, a Huguenot refugee from Catholic France who arrived on the Cape in 1688, and, more critically, Jacques’s grandson, Dawid the Younger, who left his wife, comfortable life and community behind 100 years later in order to elope with a slave girl named Sara, with whom he had at least one child.

Malan struck upon the idea for a book based on a dramatised history of the family’s two wings, one the bastion of white supremacy, the other black – or, as he notes, “Coloured”. An agent in the US secured him a book deal that came with a major advance and – he still seems exasperated at the thought – “a mini series with the people who made Roots!” he says, referring to the miniseries based on Alex Haley’s best-selling novel about the lives of an 18th-century slave and his US descendants.

But when he got back to South Africa, where he resumed his career in journalism as a crime reporter, he decided he couldn’t write that book and cancelled the deals, in order to be able to write one instead that confronted both the horrors of the apartheid system and the challenges and complexities of what was to follow, through an account of his experiences and of some of the murders he covered.

My Traitor's Heartwon much acclaim and generated controversy, too; Malan was deeply critical not just of the government but also of some aspects of the opposition. Ultimately, he was also deeply pessimistic about the prospects for a peaceful future in the country.

The book's success gave him a lot of chances to advance in the literary world, but his distaste for the liberal elite put him off joining its ranks. He has, for example, little time for the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer or André Brink, who, he maintains, might "have had maybe one or two unpleasant encounters with the secret police but generally prospered; apartheid was very good for them". He mentions reading Dreaming of the Dead, a short story in which Gordimer imagines attending a dinner party with deceased writer friends, including Edward Said, Susan Sontag and Anthony Sampson. "I have had my problems with the brothers," he says, "but I read that and just wanted to roll a grenade under the table."

He is more sympathetic towards another Nobel prize winner, JM Coetzee, the bulk of whose work he admires. But Coetzee upped and quit South Africa for Australia nearly 10 years ago. “I understand exactly why he left, and it’s okay for him to leave. The price he pays for psychic disengagement from South Africa is those dreadful, dreadful post-South Africa novels. They are really sorry affairs.”

Malan is still fully engaged in South Africa, railing in his journalism against widespread corruption and the mismanagement of the economy by, for the most part, the ANC. His assertion that economic prosperity in postcolonial Africa has tended to be linked to the number of whites who stick around has, unsurprisingly, prompted accusations of racism, while his claim that the scale of the Aids epidemic was exaggerated in order to generate more funding has been decried as reckless. His intention, he says, has simply been to write honestly about the challenge of living in a society as complex as South Africa, “and I can’t do that if I live somewhere else”.

There is certainly plenty to keep him busy in what he refers to as the “white moonbase” that continues to lie at the economic heart of the country and the predominantly black political system that now exists alongside it. Having once been a leftist, he says, he is now a “knee-jerk reactionary” and believer in the free market, although when he speaks of late-1970s Denmark as the greatest country he has ever visited it seems that his other estimation of himself as a “defeated idealist” might be a little closer to the mark.

His current bete noir, so to speak, is Julius Malema, the ANC Youth League president, whose recent public rendition of the movement's pre-democracy favourite, Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer, caused a stir on all sides of the political divide. Malema has been described as a future leader of the country by President Jacob Zuma himself, and he seems set, at the very least, to play a part in choosing Zuma's successor, but Malan sees the 29-year-old as a racist hell-bent on "victory" over whites at any cost, even if it means a repeat of the tragedy that has engulfed Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.

He suspects Malema's dramatic rise on the back of policies far more radical than anything the ANC's current leadership would countenance could be a sign that his prediction in My Traitor's Heartthat the transfer of power would turn violent might yet be proven right.

Others accuse him of alarmism. “You mightn’t like his answers,” says deputy police minister Fikile Mbalula of Malema, “but he’s talking to the country – straight talking – and pronouncing on some very critical issues that we are all struggling with.”

He might just as easily have been speaking about Malan.