Damon Galgut, a white South African playwright and novelist, has won the 2021 Booker Prize for his novel The Promise, a satirical portrait of a white family living in Pretoria in post-apartheid South Africa. The story is a very personal one for Galgut, who grew up in Pretoria and witnessed late apartheid and its demise.
The novel follows the decline of four generations of the Swart family over 40 years and starts at the end of apartheid. It focuses on the pledge made by a dying family member to bequeath the family’s property to their black domestic worker. This promise goes ignored by future generations of the family. And it becomes an allegory for the broken promises made to black South Africans at the dawn of the country’s non-racial democracy in 1994.
As an academic who has focused on South African society and history, I first came across a photo of Galgut when I was researching the End Conscription Campaign – a white anti-apartheid movement formed in 1983 that aimed to abolish compulsory military service.
Like all white men at the time, Galgut was legally obliged to serve for two years in the South African army enforcing apartheid rule. Galgut was featured as “National Serviceman of the Month” in a 1983 edition of the apartheid military’s propaganda magazine, Paratus. This is a broader subject he has explored in his 1991 novel, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs.
The majority of white South Africans are descended from Dutch settlers and speak Afrikaans. During apartheid, racial separation was legally enforced and many white people saw themselves as a superior race. Whites were given the best jobs and education – creating a wealthy white elite. After a lengthy Liberation Struggle with widespread protests and leading to a violent State of Emergency in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and negotiations began.
The African National Congress has been in power in South Africa ever since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. But under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), the party badly let down the country – with a decade of endemic corruption.
Today, more than 25 years since the first democratic elections, white South Africans continue to dominate the economy, higher education and much of the media. And white South Africans continue to wield significant political power.
At the same time, many in the country’s white community have ignored their role in ongoing racial inequality and are resistant to meaningful social, economic and political change. Large numbers of white families have emigrated or retreated to fortified luxury compounds within the country – and continue to profit from systems of structural racism. It is maybe no surprise, then, that white supremacist movements in South Africa are thriving.
