What I’m Reading
MARK Heywood plays a vital role in South African public life and in the movement for social justice: Books are as vital a part of my life as friends and comrades. At home they reside in bathrooms, on bedside tables and living rooms. They are layabouts in my office. They are accessible and sneak into every corner. That way they can be picked up, prodded for insight, peered into for snippets, quotes and ideas... or just wondered over. I divide my books between those that are permanent residents and those that have more recently come into my life. Most permanent residents stay on bookshelves. They have been read and are considered known. They gather dust but are always available.
THE newbies are recent purchases or borrowings. They number 15 to 20 at a time and vie for attention. They are of different hues and genres. Biography, fiction, poetry, history, politics. Who gets read at any moment depends on mood, my soul’s immediate need and sometimes the hard politics of day-today life.
I may not want to read a book, but circumstances require it. The Republic of Gupta, A Story of State Capture, which I am reading now, is a case in point.
The three most recent books I have read reflect that diversity. I pulled William Plomer’s Cecil Rhodes off my bookshelf by accident while I was looking for Brian Willan’s biography of Sol Plaatje.
The book had been bought many years before. But, in the meantime, Rhodes had come back into anti-fashion. Plomer’s biography is a beautiful literary polemic against Rhodes. It was written long before the time when it became fashionable and safe to attack Rhodes. It’s probably long out of print. Nonetheless, it should be a set text for every person in South Africa who seeks to understand the evil and arrogance of colonialism, and the forces that shaped our present.
At the same time as finishing off with Plomer, I was working my way through Philippe Sands’s East West Street.
This book defies easy categorisation. It is a wonder of meticulously applied research. The writer is making his own story at the same time as a story of 20th Century war, anti-semitism, the depravity of Nazism (and human complicity with it).
Through people’s agency, he traces the emergence of a new body of international human rights laws, dealing with genocide and crimes against humanity.
It, too, should be recommended reading for all concerned about the world we live in.
Finally, and while reading the other two, I read John Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man, a stock-in-trade tale of espionage transposed on to the warm wars of the 21st Century: terrorism, Islam, the fears of old Europe.
It’s an engaging story, but not a very well written one. Unlike the others, I was glad when it was over.