Neil Williams HATE NO MORE by Arthur Maimane (Kwela) This novel reflects a reality that creates ripples of destruction – ripples of destruction that occur both in the characters in the novel and the reader, who reacts with horror to some of its events. It examines the madness created by ideology.
In present-day post-apartheid South Africa, Philip Mokone is the chair of the Gauteng legislature’s equal opportunities and gender equality committee. In the prologue to the novel, we find him watching with ambivalent detachment the social interactions of a cocktail party. The party’s guests are political animals: their fixed identities and fixed beliefs are sketched by the writer. The rigidity of identity – and the consequences of that rigidity for the possibility of interaction – forms the theme of Hate No More. The main body of Arthur Maimane’s novel deals with the consequences of the apartheid madness as it affected South Africans in the decade after the Nationalists’ rise to power. It is set largely in Sophiatown in the Fifties, providing what is in many ways a stereotypical view of that place – it needs more background, more characters, to enrich the scene. It does, however, explore the way in which the humanity of the area’s inhabitants was warped by apartheid. Philip Mokone is one of them. Being trapped in time and place is also the fate of Jean Ryan, a victim of violence perpetrated by Mokone. This act brings her to the brink of madness. To Mokone, Ryan represents everything he cannot have -and everything he hates. His act of violence against her is his attempt to break free of ideological constraints, but it demonstrates only how enslaved he is to them.
The novel brings back to one all the madnesses apartheid inflicted on “inxiles”- – a term Maimane uses to describe those who remained in South Africa during the apartheid years. Hate No More is a novel with a taut and controlled narrative that shocks and disturbs and should be read. Neil Williams works in Sophiatown. He is the author of the novel Just a Little Stretch of Road (Ravan)
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