A Dry White Season: Reading Apartheid, Today

a dry landscape at sunset

This past month, I struggled to write in a way I never had before. I devoured book after book, each leaving its mark—but when I sat down at my laptop, the words refused to come. It was as if my heart and mind couldn’t agree—one wanted to write an elaborate article about how I discovered Marcel Proust, and the other couldn’t reconcile writing about Proust, however amazing he was, with our reality of televised genocide, bombings, and war crimes that have recently spilled over into other countries—as if the destruction of Palestine, in plain view of the entire world, weren’t enough.

Literature has always had a special place in my life, and although on this blog I write about both literature and politics, I didn’t want to write purely political texts. Instead, I wanted to explore political and social themes through books. Marcel Proust didn’t quite fit this time—although I think he is also very interesting politically.

Beyond writing about a book, I wanted to write about a war, a genocide. I wanted to write about the Holocaust, of which I am a contemporary, but about which I speak only with my wife and a few friends. And then it came to me—I should write about A Dry White Season, a novel as relevant today as it was when it was published forty-seven years ago. Its author is André Brink, a white Afrikaner living and writing in apartheid South Africa. Brink was not like many of his other compatriots—he didn’t want to be complicit in the crimes the oppressor class he belonged to perpetuated for forty-six years. He chose to speak out about atrocities, to stand up, even if he knew full well it would bring marginalization and persecution.

That an author such as Brink is forgotten among many Europeans is not all that surprising. We tend to forget the crimes we commit once a certain amount of time has passed, even if we once swore never to forget. It surprised me that the younger generations of South Africans I met don’t know his work. But that may be because the memory of apartheid is ingrained deeply in their bodies and minds, and they don’t need to read about it. The rest of us, however, should.

A Dry White Season is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, who serves as a contrast to Ben du Toit, the novel’s protagonist. Du Toit—played by Donald Sutherland in the film—undertakes a journey from being a high school teacher trying to mind his own business the best he could, to becoming a passionate anti-apartheid activist, which costs him his family and, ultimately, his life.

A Dry White Season is not what you would call a literary masterpiece. Brink doesn’t write beautiful, poetic prose. On the contrary, his style is dry and journalistic—he wants to bring the horrors of apartheid into the reader’s home. He wants us to not only intellectually understand the white supremacist system in South Africa but to feel it deeply in the core of our bones. Brink also asks the reader to recognize the vampirism of the capitalist, racist world—a system that can only sustain itself through death, destruction, and exploitation—and to raise our voice against it.

We need to bring André Brink back from the hole of oblivion and read his work. He isn’t the best author you will read, nor the most revolutionary. After all, however important it is, A Dry White Season is a story about one man’s awakening and struggle. Ben du Toit saw, finally, when the criminality of the apartheid system affected someone he personally knew, the illusory bubble of privilege he lived in. And he saw how quickly that privilege is lost, and how, from respected citizen, one can rapidly become a public enemy—a problem element—simply by daring to ask the “wrong questions.” Ben du Toit, however, didn’t make a large-scale change; he didn’t start a group or lead a movement. Nor do you get the impression André Brink intended him to do so. He gained consciousness and paid the greatest price.

Still, reading A Dry White Season brings something utterly necessary in the present day—a reminder of the importance of awakening, of reacting, and of standing up to crimes perpetually committed in our name.