Anthony Egan
LAST DAYS IN CLOUD CUCKOOLAND: DISPATCHES FROM WHITE AFRICA by Graham Boynton (Jonathan Ball, R99,95)
This book is hard to categorise. Its title makes it sounds like journalism; parts of it read like an attempt to understand the democratic transition in South Africa. Much of it is reminscences of a childhood in what was then called Rhodesia.
Graham Boynton grew up in Bulawayo and was educated there and at Natal University, Durban. He grew up in a fairly average white Rhodesian milieu, but came to reject it. He chose to emigrate. In South Africa he worked as a journalist until his expulsion in 1975 for opposition to apartheid. Still based in New York, he has returned to Southern Africa, as many have, to see what has happened here in recent years.
The book is a mishmash of narratives: a potted history of the colonisation of Rhodesia, the author’s recollections of his youth there and in student circles in South Africa, an overview of the democratic transition in South Africa, accounts of corruption and crime in Zimbabwe and South Africa, impressions of whites’ responses to the end to minority rule, as well as two intriguing – though possibly irrelevant – stories of murder in South Africa.
One is an account of Piet Grundlingh and Charmaine Phillips, two working-class white South Africans who went on a murder spree before their capture. The other is the still unsolved 1978 murder of Natal university academic and radical Dr Rick Turner. State death squads have been suspected of his killing. Boynton raises the theory that it was an ordinary murder, but concedes the evidence is rather thin.
He eavesdrops on a pub in Bulawayo, noting its white clientele’s cynicism about the new regime. In some ways, Boynton seems to share their sentiments.
On one level this is a book about ambivalence – that of post-colonial Southern Africa and that of a former white African. The book will be compared to Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, but Boynton is not in their league. Despite his engagingly ironic style, Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland is too unfocused, goes in too many directions at once, and doesn’t adequately investigate its subject matter.