Jane Rosenthal reviews Stealing Water by Tim Ecott
This memoir comes with an impressive array of shouts from various people in the film and book world.
It is hailed as “the greatest memoir to come out of white Africa since Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart —”.
Poor useful Rian; whatever you may think of him nowadays, he probably does not deserve to have his name splashed over this book, implying that it has the same degree of searing honesty and discomforting truth as his famous memoir written in the late 1980s. Most of those quoted in the shouts are not known cognoscenti of Southern Africa.
Of other memoirs of “white Africa” (whatever that is), what about Don’t Let’s Go to The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, Every Secret Thing, My Family My Country by Gillian Slovo, When the Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin, No-One to Blame by George Bizos, to mention a few by whites from Southern Africa.
Then other notable memoirs by people who were sometimes not white enough, and at others not black enough, are Shirley, Goodness and Mercy by Chris van Wyk and All Under Heaven by Darryl Accone. All these have more to say, both more truthfully and more knowledgeably than Tim Ecott’s memoir, which might have been written anywhere.
The only shout I could give much credence to is that by Lynne Reid Banks who at least puts her finger on the nub of the book: it’s about family relationships, mainly Ecott and his parents, and in this regard is well told and probably pretty honest.
It is a strangely blinkered account of a young boy growing to manhood while being shuttled between Northern Ireland and South Africa. His parents, themselves colonial expats with childhood experiences of British army life in the colonies, decide to leave Ireland and set up a business in South Africa, selling security systems.
But, things do not go well and the family has to split up to survive. At times the children stay with the mother in South Africa, while father goes back to Ireland. Ecott is sent to school in Ireland and despite all the upheavals does well enough to get a degree there.
But once the security business has gone bust the South African half of the family has to move into less salubrious accommodation — a smaller house, then a flat, then a run-down house in Berea.
They are always one jump ahead of their debtors (rent not paid, contracts not honoured and electricity and water obtained without paying for it). They go from being comfortably middle class in Ireland to a strangely disconnected existence in Johannesburg. When mother loses her job at the British Consulate (one of the debtors finds her there) she opens a shop selling antiques and collectables in the underground flea market in Hillbrow in the mid 1980s.
Their friends are on the fringes of South African city life: prostitutes, thieves, retired cops. Ecott says he was ashamed that they knew these people, but paradoxically he rather admires his mother who insists on the sub-moral modus vivendi they adopt.
His father’s activities as a would-be arms dealer and in the security business were also of questionable morality and Ecott does not at any stage comment on this or seem to be aware of it. There is almost no mention of the context of the South African political scene then: succeeding states of emergency; hundreds of people in detention without trial or locked up for so-called “treason”; others killed by the agents of the state.
This is the context in which Ecott’s father thought he could make a good living out of exploiting fear (security systems) and brokering weapons sales.
This memoir can at best be described as truthfully clueless. The Ecotts arrived in South Africa with their heads stuffed full of myths such as that it is dangerous to walk around the countryside.
Many whites in South Africa lived in this way — ignorant and in fear — many of these were recent immigrants from Europe and the United Kingdom.
They were a last wave of colonial exploiters, except for those who now make money in books and movies of those times.
Who should take responsibility for accuracy and honesty in these memoirs? When Ecott’s mother is arrested for trading lion skins (yes, she did that too, very collectable) and taken to John Vorster Square, he writes: “The police station was notorious for the torture of terrorist suspects, several of whom had been thrown from its upperfloor windows”.
Is it too much to ask that an editor be found who would amend this so that the tortured are not thought of as “terrorists”, and who would check the veracity of “several of whom had been thrown —”.
It’s too easy, too glib, too inaccurate. His renderings of Afrikaner English are simply ludicrous — but who would know any better in the target market of Ecott’s publisher? And who would care so long as money rolls in. The colonies are endlessly harvestable.
Far from “hilarious” it strikes me as a sadly unsavoury book. Its most interesting aspect is Ecott’s adoring obsession with his mother and his plucky battle to surface after they fell from the grace of “luxury and ease”.
A “great memoir” out of Africa it is not.