“Excelsior has become the best-known town in the world this week. The small farming community—population seven hundred—was rocked a few weeks ago when some of its prominent citizens were arrested with their black maids for contravening the Immorality Act. The white accused include the secretary of the local branch of the National Party and some of the wealthiest farmers in the district. Mr Adam de Vries is the lawyer representing the white men."
If this sounds like it is something from a work of non-fiction rather than a novel, there is a very good reason for that. This novel belongs to that grand tradition of fictional works “based on a true story.” It is a type of fiction that is loosely connected to each other by virtue of how much truth there is in the story. One thing is for sure, however: there is more factual accuracy adhering to the true story which inspired this novel than can be found in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Which is to say there is some factual accuracy here.
It was the Golden Age of Immorality in the Free State. Immorality was a pastime. It had always been popular even before laws were enacted in Parliament to curb it. It became a pastime the very day explorers’ ships weighed anchor at the Cape Peninsula centuries ago, and saw the yellow body part of the Khoikhoi women. But what we were seeing during the Golden Age was like a plague.
The dominant mode of writing style in the book is not the direct factual reporting of the man working for the BBC. The book features a type of narration commonly referred to as the voice of the collective. In other words, even when a narration is from the third-person point of view, it is usually understood if unspoken that there is still just a single perspective. The objective third-person narrative style of most novels features a narrator who is never identified and in most cases not even supposed to be a subject of consideration; it is just accepted that somewhere out there is this perhaps all-knowing being. But this novel features a narrator often engaging in self-reference with the plural first-person identification of “we.” The collective perspective is established at the outset, but often left up to the reader to remember this is the case even during descriptive sections like the above without a guiding pronounce to remind them. The collective voice is important to understand because the story is being told from the singularly unique perspective of an entire people, an entire culture.
It was Johannes Smit. He had materialised before them with a whip in his hand. He cracked it and laughed. Niki was scared. She wanted to run away, but the squat hairy gorilla blocked her way. Mmampe and Maria giggled. They had played this game with Johannes Smit before. Niki only knew of the game from fireside stories. She was not looking forward to it. She had heard of white farmers whose great sport was to waylay black girls in the fields. They chased them around and played harrowing games with them. She had never experienced these games herself And now it seemed it was her turn.
While the story told in the novel is something of a broad overview of an abominable moment in history. But the story is also winnowed down to the person level and to make it more viscerally tangible. And here with Johannes Smit and Niki is where the historical broadness is filed down to a sharp point. Johannes is the villain in case that was not clear and Niki is a victim of not just malevolence, but is astounding hypocrisy. It is a more complex than that that, of course, but that is the spine of the plot in a nutshell. What making the face-off all the more fascinating in a terrifying and appalling way is the means by which social and political culture of the historical background enters into the more personal story of these two characters and shapes and forms their actions and even how they might be viewed from one reader to the next.
