Book club: ‘Under a Blood Red Sky’ looks at South Africa’s dark past

If you remember the armed struggle of the 80s, then this book is a must-read. Born post-freedom? Then there is no way that you couldn’t read Under a Blood Red Sky either. It captures, in miniature, the contradictions and brutality of South Africa’s past. Author Annemarié van Niekerk tells it as non-fiction, almost true-crime drama.

And yes, it’s dubbed after the U2 live album of 1983, also called Under a Blood Red Sky.

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“I chose this title because of the contradiction embedded in it,” the author said. “A place of breathtaking natural beauty, symbolised by its often-celebrated blood-red sunsets, yet also shaped by a history of devastating violence and bloodshed that has not ended.”

Van Niekerk lived through it, and the book retells some of the bitch-slap sucker-punches that South Africans had to endure, whether black, white, coloured or Indian. Though everyone experienced those years in separate ways, one thing was certain. It was not how life was supposed to be lived, nor how a society could be built.

Our collective dark past

The book begins with a homecoming. Van Niekerk flew back from the Netherlands to bury a friend, Ruben, murdered with his mother on their Eastern Cape farm. As she immerses herself in the court case against their killers, the visit unlocks her own past: a strict but loving Afrikaner childhood in Port Elizabeth, a forbidden love in Umtata and the illegal years in Hillbrow and Yeoville.

Van Niekerk matriculated in 1980, taking her into the years of PW Botha’s concept of total onslaught, bomb drills, metal detectors at shopping malls and state propaganda.

“The armed struggle was more or less a masked civil war,” she said. “The country was divided along the lines of those who supported apartheid and sought to maintain it, and those who fought for liberation.”

It was, she recalled, a tempestuous and confusing time for those finding their way from childhood into adulthood “with warped moral compasses”.

Author Annemarie van Niekerk. Picture: Supplied

The world she discovered beyond her front door did not match what home and school had taught her, and reading voraciously in search of the truth set her on a collision course with her father, a man she loved dearly and clashed with constantly.

“He tried to break me in like an unruly horse, also through hidings,” she said. “The more he tried, the more obstinate I became.”

It did not match the real world

Then came her time in Umtata, where she lectured at a university and fell in love with Denzel, a black colleague. It was the time of the Immorality Act, repealed only in 1985, though the law’s shadow outlasted its repeal, she noted.

“Those of us in mixed relationships experienced harsh rejection from large segments of society,” she said. It still happens today. “I was young and vulnerable.” Violence eventually tore the relationship apart.

She has little patience for the argument that apartheid-era guilt should simply be left behind.

“It’s difficult to do so when you realise that the flip side of one’s own privilege was the pain and hardship of others,” she said. “Privilege from which I still benefit, and hardship that continues to reverberate in the lives of others.”

Today, Van Niekerk also reviews books, giving her a front-row seat to how South African literature has evolved alongside democracy. She noticed how literature has changed as society ebbed and flowed.

“For me, the most important change is that there is much more diversity among published writers, and therefore the lives and worlds that are portrayed are also more diverse,” she said.

It is, she said how a country gets to know itself. “We get to know each other better and, as a consequence, those who were strangers in the past become familiar.”

That’s the power of books.

Literature reflects social change

Under a Blood Red Sky was published first in Dutch, then in Afrikaans and now in English. The Dutch edition earned her the Netherlands’ Henriette Roland Holst prize, which was “a great surprise, but also very encouraging”.

Readers, she said, often tell her that the book “has refreshed their memories of South African history” while “touching them in a deeply personal way”.

“As South Africans, we continually have to find ways of living with and navigating these contradictions,” she said. “It can feel like a profoundly divided existence. One lived out under a blood red sky.”

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