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The novel tells the story, in the first person, of a young black male ex-student's obsession with a young English woman, Veronica Slater, whom he encounters on the segregated Durban beachfront. It is the heyday of apartheid. Although not a word is exchanged, a strong erotic bond develops between the two of them, culminating in what is later seen as a rape and for which the narrator gets the death sentence. In an absolute tour de force the narrator, only ever referred to as Mr Sibiya, waiting to be executed, writes down his story - reconstructing bit by bit not only his own and a brief history of his family, but also his obsession with the white girl, the court proceedings, and his encounters with Dr Dufre, a Swiss criminologist who has been granted permission of compile a dossier of the case. One of the most remarkable things about the novel is the narrator's ability to be objective, to view himself and the series of events almost dispassionately.… (more)
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With very conscious echoes of To kill a mockingbird and L'Étranger, this is framed as a first-person account from the condemned cell by a young Zulu man, Sibiya, who has been convicted of raping a white woman, Veronica, whom he has met after they exchanged glances across the buffer strip between the "Whites" and "Non-Whites" sections of a Durban beach. According to him, they have been playing a silent but mutually-understood flirting game with each other for some weeks, each enjoying the power of their own sexual attraction and the frisson of its forbiddenness for the other. When they eventually get each other so wound up that they end up in her bed together, they are interrupted by white friends of hers, and she accuses him of rape to avoid being prosecuted under the Immorality Acts herself. Her version, of course, is that it's all in his imagination, that she had never even looked at "that native" before he broke into her house.
Obviously we're meant to be uncomfortable with this: Nkosi is a writer who loves to provoke. He knows perfectly well that liberal, western readers in the 1980s aren't going to trust a narrator who is an accused rapist and not only never lets his alleged victim speak for herself, but also accuses her of being of loose morals and "not very bright". He exploits that, to make us ask ourselves if we distrust Sibiya more than Veronica because he's black, or even because he has been convicted by what is obviously a farcically prejudiced court.
There's a lot of rather black comedy in the book: in court, where the prosecuting attorney has the wonderful name "Kakmekaar" (sorry, you need to understand Dutch or Afrikaans for this) and where the official interpreter, provided by the court to maintain the legal fiction that "natives" can't understand English or Afrikaans, solemnly tells the judge that the Zulu language has no word for "orgies". The judge exclaims, "Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?" Nkosi makes the most of the prurience inherent in a rape trial: there's a lot more talk about the enormous size of Sibiya's penis than is strictly necessary, and it's clear that many of those in court are enjoying it. The bleak comedy continues in the condemned cell, where Sibiya is being interviewed by the Swiss Freudian criminologist, Dr Dupré, who wrong-headedly seeks for symbols in everything Sibiya tells him about his early life or about his encounter with Veronica.
An unsettling book, as it's meant to be, and a clever and provocative one. But it seems to be kicking in an open door: by the time it appeared, the Immorality Act provisions against interracial sex had already been repealed; segregation on beaches lingered on in theory until 1989, but in many places the authorities stopped enforcing it in the early eighties.