De vermissing

by Lewis Nkosi, Robert Dorsman (Translator)

Na lange afwezigheid keert een blanke Zuidafrikaan terug naar zijn geboorteland als rapporteur voor een mensenrechtenorganisatie.

Genres: Africa, Novels

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this book, and it took me 100 pages to work out what period it was set in, but the interest and pace picked up as the story went along, and in the end I enjoyed it very much.

At first the descriptions seemed over the top, like one of those old TV sets where the colour and brightness levels were turned up too high. For example, "She was slim but strong, with long haunches like a well-bred horse, impressive in a solemn kind of way, shy yet provocatively earthy, painfully reticient but when drawn into converstion likely to unfold suddenly, as a quick responsive mountain flower after rain."

It's set in the dying days of the apartheid era (OK, I've given the game away, but it's not really a spoiler, just a puzzle I had, trying to work out if it was set in the 1960s or the late 1980s). The National Liberation Movement sends Cornelius Molapo to his home ground of Tabanyane, to coordinate a local uprising with the national liberation struggle. To account for his disappearance they put around the story that he had been detained by the Security Police, which brings Anthony Ferguson, who works for an international human rights NGO, to South Africa to investigate his disappearance. For Ferguson, a South African expatriate who had been out of the country for 15 years, it was as much of a strange homecoming as going home to Tabanyane was for Cornelius Molapo.

There are many surprising twists in the plot, and eventually Anthony Ferguson comes face to face with Cornelius Molapo, in circumstances he could never have imagined.

[Initially NO · Rating 3 out of 5]

I check the date of the book. I don’t like reading books that are out of date, unless I’m reading something like The Tain, or the Odyssey. This book was first published in South Africa in 2002, a history of African writing on the apartheid, fictionalised. The cover features a manhole with a street-art style dancer painted on it. The back blurb says the book has humour, well uses the term ‘sardonic wit’. I think of this to mean humour. I’m encouraged. I like a laugh. I open to a section of writing. I look for a writing style that flows in a way I consider authentic. What will put me off a book is prose that patronises and seems plastic, though there are many good plot driven books that have this style. Nkosi’s style is authentic enough though, so I take the book with me.

I read on public transport, in pubs waiting for gigs, while friends are watching sport on television… The noise around me isn’t interesting enough to distract me, but let’s just say I rarely read where it is quiet. Perhaps that’s why the first half of this book I found hard to get into. I picked up biting traces of character description, but I was wondering to what purpose. I think it is that Nkosi is showing a scene and people in that scene are not driving the plot so much as the clouds in the sky might indicate rain. The book, however, did gather momentum towards the end as the narrator drew me into the fight and ended with me wanting more pages. I felt like the read was halted in the middle of a racing pace. Not that it necessarily needs to be changed, just that, that’s the experience the book gives: a slow meander to begin, ending with a burst of speed and no cool down conclusion.

There isn’t much humour in this book though, I’m not sure why the blurb misled me into thinking that that was the author’s style. Sardonic? Yep there’s mocking, cutting sarcasm though, which is what I refer to as the interesting descriptions of people. These descriptions were at the beginning, the reason to read, until the plot kicked in and I got wondering who, where and what would be happening next.