My Traitor's Heart
by Rian Malan
An Afrikaner confronts what his family built.
you want to understand apartheid from inside the conscience of someone who benefited from it and couldn't live with that
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Malan left South Africa rather than serve in the apartheid military, lived in America, and then went back to reckon with his history. His family is old Afrikaner stock — his great-uncle was the first apartheid prime minister. This memoir moves between crime scenes, family history, and political analysis to ask what it means to be white in South Africa. Perhaps the most important memoir ever published by a white South African — honest about complicity in a way that most settler narratives never manage. Uncomfortable and essential.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- South Africa • Southern Africa
- Voice
- Written by a South African author
- Themes
- True Cost of EmpireAfter EmpireWitness
