Ben du Toit is a man without any really strong convictions. A relatively successful teacher at a private boys school in Johannesburg, he is middle-class, hardworking, decent and, he would argue, fair-minded.
When Gordon Ngubene, the gardener at his school, approaches him to help find his son Jonathan, arrested at a demonstration, Ben is surprised by the request. Initially curious, not expecting anything more complicated than a simple mistaken identity or overzealous arrest, he agrees.
But, sucked into the maelstrom of apartheid, police brutality, corruption, injustice and violence, du Toit’s privileged family life and social values crumble around him. As he campaigns for the answers, first Jonathan and then Gordon disappear into the pits of police detention cells.
Ben’s family turn against him, his colleagues are vitriolic in their condemnation, the authorities initially sinister in their warnings. But shocked by his findings of a society built on privilege, injustice and paranoia, he cannot walk away, even after the deaths of Jonathan, Gordon and, by suicide, Emily Ngubene. He pays the ultimate price as he moves from ignorance to political consciousness.
A Dry White Season is not didactic agit-prop
Author Andre Brink is one of the most respected South African novelists who from the 1970s challenged, in his writings, the apartheid regime. He was the first Afrikaner writer to be censored - his second book, Looking on Darkness (W. H. Allen, 1974), was banned by the regime for its explicit condemnation of apartheid and candid depiction of an (illegal) inter-racial relationship. Its publication led to confiscation of his typewriters and receipt of death threats. But Brink remained in South Africa, to “assume my full responsibility for every word I write within my society.”
A faculty member of the Afrikaans department at Rhodes University from 1961, he published A Dry White Season in 1979. It received instant international acclaim and he received, among others, the Martin L. King Memorial Prize (UK) and the Médicis étranger prize (France) for the novel.
As a result of the 1989 film adaptation starring Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando, A Dry White Season is arguably Andre Brink’s best known work.
It’s startling and it’s powerful. Intrinsically, A Dry White Season is about state-sanctioned racism and political terrorism. But it goes much deeper. Ben is forced to balance personal duty to his family against his own personal moral duty – what he finds out cannot be simply ignored.
“If I act, I cannot but lose. But if I do not act, it is a different kind of defeat, equally decisive and maybe worse. Because then I will not even have a conscience left.
The end seems ineluctable: failure, defeat, loss. The only choice I have left is whether I am prepared to salvage a little honour, a little decency, a little humanity - or nothing.”
Thirty years after its initial publication, A Dry White Season remains a powerful reminder of the injustices of South African apartheid.
Source
- A Dry White Season by Andre Brink (W. H. Allen, 1979)
Keith Lawrence - Published writer of articles in magazines, newspapers and websites, predominantly on culture, alongside ghostwriter/editor/copywriter.
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