A Pale Native ....

When all of us foreigners arrive in South Africa ... the one thing we are all intensely fascinated by is essentially - What It was like - you know - Before the Change ...

When you see black people - you want to hear about how hard it was under apartheid, how they struggled, what made them want to fight ....

When you see white people - you want to know how they could have lived through apartheid committing/watching the injustices, whether they did anything to rage against the machine .... and importantly what it feels like now ....

What you find eventually is that few people are honest, few people satisfy what you want to know and frankly few people really want to talk about it ....

And so ... we all have to turn to reading everything we can get our hands on to understand a bit better .... the books that everyone knows about - Rian Malan's My Traitors Heart, The Bang Bang Club (about a group of young photojournalists during the township wars), classics such as Alan Paton's Cry My Beloved Country or anything by Nadime Gordimer .... and of course - everyone's favourite door stop - Nelson's Mandela's autobiography .... and the list for anyone thinking of visiting could go on and on ....Steve Biko, Ahmed Kathrada Antjie Krog, Desmond Tutu etc etc ...

But for me the most honest, riveting and my favourite of all so far has been the memoirs of the "rogue" journalist Max du Preez's - Pale Native .... someone who was openly admired and thanked by Mandela yet who also managed to be avowed adversary of both the old apartheid government and the new Mbeki regime .... his writing is delicious and completely honest ....

Max du Preez is particularly special because he set up the first Afrikaans anti-apartheid newspaper Vrye Weekblad (his aim apparently to wrest the language of Afrikaans away from clutches of apartheid) .... for which he was rewarded with a bombing, two assassination attempts and permanent residence on the hitlists of right-wing groups ....

He and his merry band of reporters (including interestingly Jacques du Pauw whose memoir Dances with Devils is also a cracking read ... and Helen Zille - ex Black Sash, ex MP for Khayelitsha township, and current Mayor of Cape Town and head of the Democratic Alliance - the only real opposition party in SA) more than any other journalists brought the real guts and nastiness stories of apartheid South Africa to the homes of white south africans (at least those who were open to reading about it) .... yet he's also honest about dealing with flip-side of what they fought to overthrow - and he writes openly about what its like now for white afrikaaner males in the process of "transformation" - essentially being bottom of every desirability totem pole ....

But what i really love about this book .... is whilst almost everything else i've read on Africa and the many global meddling hands in its many conflicts - has made me want to slit my wrists whilst fitting a car exhaust pipe to my mouth .... reading Max du Preez makes me almost joyful .... because you're left knowing that however many George Bushes or FW de Klerks or Tony Blairs there are in this world doing their best to manipulate and obfuscate .... he and other investigative journalists like him are out there remaining difficult, ornery and uncompromising .... doing everything they can to dig out the truth and convince us to read it ....