Staying Power

The following review first appeared in Jewish Quartely Number 216, Winter 2010.

Ways of Staying

By Kevin Bloom

Glenhazel on a Saturday morning is not all that different from Golders Green on a Saturday morning. The Orthodox are out in the street, men and boys in black hats and suits, knitted kippot and tsitsit, women and girls in long skirts and sleeves, wives in sheitels, scarves and snoods. But, aside from Lubavitchers, you aren’t likely to see any Hassidim in this affluent, predominantly Jewish suburb. Johannesburg’s Jews are overwhelmingly Mitnagdim, descendants of Lithuanian Jews who fled successive waves of pogroms. Look closer and other, starker, differences become apparent. The houses are surrounded by high walls emblazoned with security signs and surmounted with electrified fencing. Behind every wall is a barking dog. Heavily armed guards (trained mercenaries, many of them veterans of Africa’s wars) prowl the streets of this gated community in Double Cab four-by-fours. And yet nobody feels entirely safe in this self-enforced ghetto—even with their private army. So why do they stay?

Why do they stay in a country that, as Kevin Bloom points out in Ways of Staying, his disquieting portrait of contemporary South Africa, averages 50 murders a day? Why not pack up, like so many others have, and leave for Israel, Australia, Canada? Why not live in Golders Green? Why remain in a country that, according to Time magazine, has some of the highest incidences of child and baby rape in the world? Why live in a place where (Bloom again) ‘murders are inevitable, a necessary tax of history’?

Don’t expect any satisfying answers from the author, a fourth generation South African Jew with a seemingly unbreakable attachment to his homeland. ‘Are,’ he asks, ‘any of these questions worth asking?’ Bloom never quite gets to grips with why the murderers murder and the rapists rape—their actual, private motivates rather than the heavily politicised motives ascribed to their horrendous acts (revenge, resentment, retribution for the near ineradicable inequality that nearly half a century of apartheid has bequeathed). In a book consisting largely of conversations, many of them wrenching testimonies, it is striking that Bloom, an accomplished journalist, does not interview any killers or rapists, convicted or otherwise. He has no palliatives or solutions to offer, nor does he present a particularly probing or original thesis about state of the nation. But that, paradoxically, is the book’s greatest strength. It is not his analysis but, rather, his masterful portraits—the man from an isolated, rural village in Kwazulu-Natal struggling to get his degree on a pitiful allowance and without running water, the Jewish mother whose young child is shot in a housebreaking, the resolute schoolgirl who recounts her rape ordeal—that will ensure that Ways of Staying, like Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart and Greg Marinovich’s The Bang-bang Club, will become an enduring classic.

Ways of Staying begins, appropriately, with a funeral. The funeral of Bloom’s cousin, fashion designer Richard Bloom, murdered with his friend, the actor Brett Goldin, on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006. The trial that follows turns the family’s private tragedy, along with the case of David Ratray, the renowned Anglo-Zulu War historian, shot dead in his Fugitives Drift Lodge by six armed men, into a media-stoked national obsession.

Speaking at his funeral Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, founder of the Inkatha Freedom Party and the traditional prime minister of the Zulu nation, thanked Ratray on behalf of the Zulu nation and its current king for his work as a historian and, poignantly given that his killers were black, for his contributions to reconciliation. He added his voice to the call, already made by public figures, opposition politicians and the general public in a series of highly publicised anti-crime vigils, that the country’s leaders, at the very least, acknowledge the severity of the crime problem. Shortly afterwards, a large bank (significantly, the bank is not named) allocated twenty million rand (approximately 1.8 million pounds) for a national advertising campaign to bring the problem to the attention of President Thabo Mbeki. ‘Local media reported that the government had accused the bank of “incitement”, and that the bank, fearing the consequences, had backed down,’ writes Bloom in a prudent, scrupulously impersonal tone. To outside eyes the accusation of ‘incitement’ for pointing out the obvious—the astonishing crime rate that affects all South Africans, regardless of the colour of their skin or the size of their bank accounts—might seem a tad bizarre, but to South Africans familiar with Mbeki’s obstinate refusal to recognise the extent of the AIDS crisis—or, indeed, his refusal to consider HIV the cause of AIDS—it was business as usual.

Well, if you can’t get your country’s leaders to change you can—in a democratic country, at least—change your leaders. Or so the theory goes. But for many white South Africans, Mbeki’s successor, Jacob Zuma, an outspoken populist and former South African Communist Party member, was a dismaying prospect. Would his ties to the far left prejudice him against white business interests? Charges of racketeering, money laundering, corruption and fraud (dropped), a sensational rape trial (acquitted), a fractious relationship with the media (ongoing) and an offbeat, to say the least, choice of campaign song, Lethu Mshini Wami (‘Bring Me My Machine Gun’) jangled white nerves. Amongst black voters, however, Zuma was the clear favourite. Once again the country was fracturing along racial lines. Bloom, accompanied by Branko Brkic, his editor at Maverick magazine, covers the turbulent Polokwane conference where Zuma was elected President of the ANC, deposing Mbeki. For Brkic (who escaped from a disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1991), the internecine drama of the conference and the incendiary pronouncements of Zuma’s supporters bore chilling parallels to the ascension of Milosevic. Bloom, however, is no Chicken Little. Ahead of the curve (Zuma’s approval ratings have been climbing steadily) Bloom points to Zuma’s inaugural speech where, unlike his predecessor, he acknowledges the crime problem head on. ‘If we were able to defeat vigilantism and the apartheid system,’ he quotes Zuma as saying, ‘what can stop us from defeating this ugly factor that has tainted our democracy?’

A wave of pogroms, perhaps. Just at the moment of highest hope, ‘xenophobic riots’ (as the pogroms have become known in South African parlance) directed against kwerekwere (a derogatory term for ‘dark-skinned foreigners’, refugees and illegal immigrants from across Africa) break out, an appalling coup de theatre (rather like the cheap dramatics, Bloom himself employs, most notably the cliff hanger gap which he uses with annoying, but effective, regularity) that threatens, once again, to turn the dream of a ‘rainbow nation’ into Brkic’s nightmare. But Bloom, shaken, his reserves of clear-eyed optimism strained to their limits, will not give up on his country. Right until the final line of this sad, troubling, but, ultimately, hopeful book Bloom is searching for ways of staying.