A Dry White Season by André Brink
"A Dry White Season" by André Brink is a poignant novel set in the context of apartheid-era South Africa, exploring themes of moral awakening and social injustice. The story follows Ben du Toit, a white South African who grapples with the oppressive realities surrounding him, particularly the brutal treatment faced by the black community. This narrative is set against the backdrop of the real-life atrocities committed during the apartheid regime, including the tragic fate of Steve Biko, a notable anti-apartheid activist.
When Ben learns of the brutal torture of Jonathan, the son of his gardener, he is propelled into a quest for justice, which ultimately leads him to confront the deeper systemic violence and disappearances inflicted by the state. Brink vividly depicts the contrasting landscapes of South Africa—from the impoverished townships to the majestic countryside—while also revealing the human complexities of both the oppressed and the oppressors. Through Ben's journey, the novel interrogates the moral complicity of individuals within a corrupt system, inviting readers to reflect on the broader implications of racism and injustice. "A Dry White Season" stands as a powerful commentary on the struggles against apartheid, shedding light on the personal and societal consequences of living in a fractured nation.
A Dry White Season by André Brink
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:’N droë wit seison, 1979 (English translation, 1979)
Type of work: Novel
The Work
In A Dry White Season, a successful novel which became a successful motion picture, Brink visits familiar terrain, namely Afrikaner South Africa (as opposed to British South Africa) at a time of moral and spiritual drought just prior to the coming of the storms of change that will bring this nation rain and renewal. As did his earlier novel, Rumours of Rain, Brink’s A Dry White Season gives readers a white South African protagonist, but this time one more in keeping with Brink’s own actively subversive nature, as well as one in tune with Steve Biko, a real-life hero who died after being tortured and killed while in the custody of the South African police at the very time this novel was written.
Unlike the narrator in Rumours of Rain, the generally self-seeking businessman Martin Mynhardt, this book concerns Ben du Toit, who from his student days has been an agent of resistance against the powers fostering the injustice he sees festering in his country. When Ben finds that Jonathan, the son of his school’s gardener, Gordon Ngubene, has had his skin deeply scored six times by a knife while being detained by police on suspicion of being part of a minor melee, he becomes enraged. Jonathan Ngubene has been supported by Ben and is a kind of son to him, so this act of brutality against Jonathan is appalling to Ben. Things, however, get worse when Ben finds that Gordon, the boy’s father, has disappeared after he searched for his son, who was in police custody. Gordon vanishes into the police state netherworld of apartheid secrecy, and Ben finds he must investigate Gordon’s fate, something that brings on his own destruction and martyrdom.
In this novel, Brink manages to deliver the physicality of his native South Africa, especially in his descriptions of all of those squalid, stinking, rotting, dangerous black townships, like Soweto, where the poor black majority of South Africans attempt to survive, but also in the glorious revealed splendor of that country’s veld lands with its famous animal denizens. Yet another sight, one even more memorable, is revealed when the curtain is parted and readers see state lock-ups filled with the detritus of despairing convicts, places where torture is a daily occurrence. Here is the state’s fearsome underbelly, a place where fear breeds hatred toward the feared. On the other hand, Brink also gives readers glimpses of humanity among the worst of these guards and torturers, seeing them as vulnerable persons whose pathetic lives are bound up in fear of “the Other,” here represented best by Gordon, Jonathan, and then Ben.
Brink’s readers function as both judge and jury for the old apartheid state of South Africa in the world’s courthouse of opinion. As prosecuting attorney, the author could be seen to say to them, as any good prosecutor would, “Here is the system we Afrikaners have assembled, and this terrible system does not deserve to live another day!”
Bibliography
Brink, André. “An Uneasy Freedom: Dangers of Political Management of Culture in South Africa.” The Times Literary Supplement, September 24, 1993, p. 13.
Brown, Duncan, and Bruno van Dyk, eds. Exchanges: South African Writing in Transition. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1991.
Jolly, Rosemary June. Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: André Brink, Breyten Breytenback, and J. M. Coetzee. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996.
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. “A Talk with André Brink.” The New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1982, pp. 14-15.
“Writing Against Big Brother: Notes on Apocalyptic Fiction in South Africa.” World Literature Today 58, no. 2 (1984): 89-94.