David's story /

Postapartheid and postmodern, this dense, scholarly novel is for those who know South African history or think they do. At the center of the story is David Dirkse, longtime activist in the struggle against apartheid. He's still part of the movement in 1991, when Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison. David is tracing the history of his "Coloured" (mixed-race) ancestors, right back to the Khoisan people who were there when whites first "discovered" the Cape and found the natives "ungovernable." David's story is also interwoven with other narratives, including that of his lover, Dulcie, who was tortured in the guerrilla detention camps and whose voice is "like a scream through history." Then there are the short racist quotes from white missionaries and writers, past and present, most of them about black women and the shame of racial mixing. There's no preaching. In fact, as Dorothy Driver points out in the lengthy afterword, Wicomb is commenting on her own intricate narrative, showing how hard it is to tell the truth. --Hazel Rochman

A fabulous family tree branches backward into South African history and myth in Wicomb's second novel (after You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town). David Dirkse, somewhat shamefacedly, has left his wife and kids in Cape Town to search for his roots in Kokstad. The date is 1991; David, a cadre of the ANC, Mandela's party, should be feeling elated by the approaching collapse of apartheid. Instead, he is vaguely melancholy, perhaps because he is suppressing his feeling for a fellow cadre, Dulcie Olifant. David, like his wife, Sally, is "colored," which means he belongs to that curious South African racial category, defined in the social hierarchy as some degree above black and some degree below white. In researching his ancestors, he studies the history of a tribe called Griqua, who are considered in Kokstad to be of low social status they are perhaps synonymous with the Hottentots. His inquiries focus on their 19th-century leader, Andrew La Fleur, for whom the Griqua were to be a model of "separate development" a fatal phrase, the root of the apartheid ideal. David's relationship to La Fleur comes from the "telegonic" birth of his great-grandmother, Ouma Ragel; Antjie, Ragel's mother, supposedly conceived from looking at La Fleur. At the top of the whole tree, as far as David is concerned, is the steatopygous Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, whose large buttocks amazed 19th-century European scientists. Complex, sympathetic, but desultory in its plotting and slow in pace, Wicomb's novel unravels a long, fascinating family history. Her tale is a sometimes happy, sometimes ironic unmasking of denials and a revelation of an imperfect, unlikely reality. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Published in 1987, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town won Wicomb international fame. Her new work, an epic retelling of the settlement of South Africa's Griqualand, will bring her into the spotlight again. The book opens in 1991, when the legalization of the African National Congress (ANC), the release of Nelson Mandela, and the end of apartheid are effecting huge changes in South Africa. Confused about his identity and status (he is categorized as "colored," placing him somewhere between black and white in apartheid society), ANC cadre David Dirkse leaves Cape Town for Kokstad to research his family tree. There, he discovers that he is distantly related to Andries Abraham Stockhausen La Fleur, who led the Griqua tribe into the desert in the 19th century. What results is an excellent retelling of the settlement of Griqualand. More than a history lesson, however, or even an exciting adventure story, this book is a huge step in the remaking of the South African novel. A tremendous achievement. Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The publisher’s latest entry in the Women Writing Africa series: a postmodern tale of the new South Africa that brings a rich sense of allusion, irony, and the past to the dangers the hero, a Griqua descendant of the original Khoi inhabitants, faces when he finds his life threatened in an increasingly African nationalist milieu. Referring frequently to writers as diverse as Joyce, Morrison, and Breytenbach, Wicomb (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, not reviewed) demonstrates an easy familiarity with the local—especially the Colored—vernacular as she tells spins a yarn that’s part history, part political analysis, and part thriller. She picks up David Dirkse’s story in 1991, a year after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, as South Africans adjust to the end of apartheid. David’s Colored (mixed-race) mother-in-law, Ouma Sarie, now feels free enough to visit the renovated Logan Hotel, where she worked as a maid for 50 years. Her daughter Sally, a former guerrilla now married to David and mother of two children, is finding domesticity boring; not only that but she suspects there’s another woman in David’s life. Which there is: a shadowy, even symbolic, presence called Dulcie, a guerrilla who was tortured and raped by both sides. David, a dedicated freedom fighter still working for the African National Congress, decides to visit Kokstad in East Griqualand to research his family. There, he learns more about his Griqua ancestor Andrew le Fleur, who, seeing his land taken over by white farmers, led a rebellion, was imprisoned by the British, and then, once free, led the Griquas west into the desert. But David finds that the Struggle is not over: he has enemies, possibly in the ANC itself, and his name is on a hit list. A provocative post-apartheid novel that raises troubling questions about the role of women, Coloreds, and other non-African minorities in the new South Africa.