A battle of memory in the new SA

DANCE OF THE RAIN, by Tom Naude. Heinemann Publishers, Johannesburg.  2009. 142pp.

Reviewed by Michael Shackleton

From 1994 South Africa took off in a new direction. To those who have lived through the immense changes since then, life is a daily lesson in human relations. For Jonathan Clarke, who left this country as a boy and came back more than 50 years later, after 1994, there are only childhood memories of school friends and a carefree life. These ill prepare him for what he finds when he returns to his home town of Nijlsrivier in the Waterberg, in Tom Naude’s debut novel.

Jonathan’s father, an Englishman who had been sent to South Africa by his employer Barclays Bank, married an Afrikaans woman. With his British and Boer blood, Jonathan attended an Afrikaans school in Nijlsrivier, a small town in the Waterberg region near Pretoria, and also a respectable English school in Cape Town.

Then, when he was in his teens, his father took his family back to England, where Jonathan grew up, married, and for 40 laborious years worked, like his father, in Barclays Bank.

An obsessive longing to go back to Nijlsrivier, where he had enjoyed an adventurous life with his young friends, makes him assure his wife that it would be only a brief visit for sentimental reasons. Things turn out somewhat differently, however.

The people of Nijlsrivier are totally alien to what he holds in his memories. There is a black government with black officials. There are farmers who are unhappy about this. There is his old school teacher who had represented the notorious Christian National Education of the time and who had taught him the poetry of Eugene Marais. (It is Marais’ poem “Dance of the Rain” that gives the book its title.)

Jonathan wants to know what happened to his old childhood friends and their families. He finds it difficult to accept the truth. As he seeks to learn more, the story takes a few gripping twists. He meets people who impress him deeply. This dull Englishman is excited by what has happened and what is happening. But he must go back to his wife and to an uncertain future.

Strangely, this pukka Englishman with his early exposure among verkrampte Afrikaners, is torn by his Englishness and his sense of belonging among his old friends in the Swartberg. The “dance of the rain” underlies his dilemma. Marais’ brilliantly evocative poetry deeply affects Jonathan. In the verse, the rain suggests itself gently as it peers over the mountain top and slowly embraces the valley, and Jonathan’s memories of this and the thunderstorms and wet paving stones of his early days, climax in his realisation that Waterberg has drenched him with memories he simply cannot cancel from his mind.

Ironically, he has to recall the warning of the woman he met on the plane: “Your memories are building a place that does not exist. The past is dead.”

This is a well told story. South Africans of all ages and persuasions should appreciate it. It covers so much of our shaky history as it brings out characters and attitudes that are not new or strange to us.

The author, I am told, penned this book when he was 80, and it is his first publication.