Quiet Kind of Courage
By Anthony Schneider
(Penguin, R180 )
A committed white South African sets out to change the hated system of apartheid. A member of the South African Communist Party, Henry Wegland joins the fledgling uMkhonto we Sizwe to take the fight to the apartheid government. He takes part in a bombing campaign, only to be banned.
And then he meets and falls in love – with fellow banned comrade, Nellie Mkatshwa.
As the government begins rounding up MK cadres and ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Wegland makes his escape. The rub is, he can’t take his son or his wife with him.
Ending up in miserable exile in New York, his young son eventually joins him, but by then his wife is in jail serving out a 90-day detention.
Half-a-century later author Anthony Schneider introduces us to an octogenarian Wegland, living with his grown up son Glenn and his grandson Saul.
It is Saul whom Wegland encourages to go back to South Africa – and discover his grandfather’s history, and infidelity.
Schneider tells the story through this dual prism of time, with the gritty retelling of contemporary post-apartheid South Africa reinforcing the authenticity of his imagined early Sixties filled with the heady spirit of optimism before the Rivonia Raid and the Treason Trial. Afterwards, there would be nothing but oppression, the liberation movements eviscerated for a decade-and-a- half, until the Soweto pupils rose up in 1976.
Schneider, who was born and bred in Joburg, living in Westcliff and attending St John’s College, left South Africa in 1977, as a 12-year-old when his lawyer father took the family to Atlanta, Georgia, in the US.
Schneider’s dad grew up in Observatory and knew Arthur Goldreich, who played a central role in the Rivonia Raid. He also met Mandela in a professional capacity, although Schneider senior was not actively involved in the struggle against apartheid.
“Even then, he thought he was in the presence of greatness,” Schneider remembers.
The book took Schneider years to write, almost seven in fact, as he held down his day job running an online marketing company, writing short stories in the evening and devoting his time between work in New york and a relationship in London.
His upbringing provided the spark, but the detail was filled in from primary sources, like Hilda Bernstein’s The World That was Ours and interviews with the children of exiled activists about their experiences growing up outside South Africa.
For Schneider, there is none of the bitterness of resentment associated with experiencing the country of today with what his parents and the main protagonist in the book, Henry Wegland feels.
“The book captures the narrative of anger, (South Africa) is not the land he hoped it would be.”
Schneider doesn’t share the view. For one, he’s been coming back as regularly as possible to the land of his birth ever since he left. The timing of his departure too was more real, the idealism of the Sixties stripped away by Soweto’s preview of what would be the totalitarianism of total onslaught in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“I don’t have that false nostalgia for the future that that generation has.”
Indeed, Schneider is so enamoured of South Africa that his next novel will be set here, too.
In the meantime though, he’s keeping his fingers crossed that his characterisation and plot will strike a chord with those who lived through the heady events of 50 years ago and modern readers alike.
His parents, who read the first draft, are pleased, which served to allay some of Schneider’s nerves, while local reviews have been very positive – including a glowing testimonial from South Africa’s resident literary Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, on the front page.
A Quiet Kind of Courage is a meticulously researched book that cleverly captures the zeitgeist of the Fifties and Sixties and the innocent idealism of the first MK cadres as well as the ache of exile and the pain of post- apartheid reality. The timing helps too since July 11 was the 50th anniversary of the Rivonia Raid and the Treason Trial that it launched.
But it’s more than all of that put together, simply put it’s a gripping story of humans living, loving and making sense of difficult times across two continents.