Complex intersections of sex and struggle in the anti-apartheid movement

The plot twists and turns -- l yrical in its descriptions of life as the seasons change

SHADOW PLAY was to be the second novel in an intended trilogy. Gerald Kraak, the author, died in 2014 before actually finishing it.

His estate then asked Alison Lowry to work from Kraak’s notes and complete it. The first book, Ice in the Lungs, was critically acclaimed and jointly won the European Literary Award in 2006.

To set the scene for Kraak’s work, it is pertinent to quote from Andy Carolin writing in the Journal of Literary Studies (September 2015): “I focus particularly on Gerald Kraak’s novel Ice in the Lungs (2006) to reveal the importance of literature in re-inscribing a gay cultural history into discourses of the apartheid era.

“The text does this in a way that celebrates eroticism and resists desexualising, or sanitising representational impulses. The novel speaks to the silences in official sites of history-making in South Africa and reveals the complex intersections of sex and struggle in the anti-apartheid movement.”

It is also relevant to sketch in some of Kraak’s background, which contextualises the story. He studied English, history, comparative African government and law at the UCT.

With many others of the politicised middle class, he became involved in student politics and campaigns, supporting those who resisted army conscription; gradually he became involved in illegal, partly ANC-related trade union activities.

After returning to South Africa from exile, he joined Atlantic Philanthropies and he wrote about South African trade union activities before and after the (formal) abolition of apartheid, and about socio-economic development.

He was also involved in gay activism. Shadow Play, although a standalone novel, picks up the stories of Matthew, in exile in Amsterdam, and Mandla, initially in ANC training camps in Russia and Angola and then deployed to various places, including Mpumalanga, London and Dar es Salaam to act as a contact person and conduit for informers.

Although the political anti-apartheid thread runs through, the story lines are mostly concerned with the lives and loves, trials and tribulations encountered by Matthew and Mandla in their disparate ways.

Mandla becomes sexually involved with Rachel, with whom he works in Helderstroom, an apparently fictitious town near Ermelo in Mpumalanga near the Swazi border, while establishing a network of underground contacts in the townships.

Matthew, on the other hand, is gay and welcomes the openness of gay life in Amsterdam, initially with his old friend Oliver with whom he stays when first he arrives there – delighting in the discovery that Oliver has come out as gay too.

As in Ice in the Lungs, the sex is explicit and erotic. Matthew also becomes involved in the anarchic squatter movement of the 1970s in Amsterdam, that is, until he is warned off by Mandla, who has become his handler. The plot twists and turns – lyrical in its descriptions of life as the seasons change in Amsterdam, grim in its depiction of London in the same time.

I found this a compelling read and a refreshingly “other” take on the internal tensions in the anti-apartheid movement both racial and sexual.