The Promise by Damon Galgut
Pause a moment to observe, as she takes the sheets off the bed. A stout, solid woman, wearing a second-hand dress, given to her by Ma years ago. A headscarf tied over her hair. She is barefoot, and the soles of her feet are cracked and dirty. Her hands have marks on them too, the scuffs and scars of innumerable collisions. Same age as Ma, supposedly, forty, thought she looks older. Hard to put an exact number on her. Not much shows in her face, she wears her life like a mask, like a graven image.
Thirteen-year-old Amor Swart watches as Salome, her family’s domestic worker, cleans up her mother’s room. The pudgy girl Amor has just returned from boarding school to attend her mother’s funeral. Overwhelmed by the situation, she doesn’t join her family for prayers and biscuits in the lounge, but she escapes to the koppie, the little hill, by the house from where she has a view into her mother’s bedroom.
When she was little, Amor was struck by a lightning on this koppie, which cost her a toe and almost her life. But still she feels drawn to the koppie, which stands between her family’s house and the little dilapidated cottage where Salome lives with her son, Lukas.
But some things you do know, because you saw them yourself. The impassive way that Salome sweeps and cleans the house and washes the clothes of the people who live in it, she looked after Ma through her last illness, dressing and undressing her, helping her to bathe with a bucket of hot water and a lappie, helping her to go to the toilet, yes, even wiping her arse for her after she used the bedpan, mopping up blood and shit and pus and piss, all the jobs that people in her family didn’t want to do, too dirty or too intimate, Let Salome do it, that’s what she’s paid for, isn’t it? She was with Ma when she died, right there next to the bed, though nobody seems to see her, she is apparently invisible. And what-ever Salome feels is invisible too. She has been told, Clean up here, wash the sheets, and she obeys, she cleans up, she washes the sheets.
Amor remembers, or believes to remember (mind you, she once was struck by lightning) that on her deathbed, her mother had her father promise that after her death he would give Salome the deeds to the little cottage. But, her parents were not aware that Amor was in the room.
They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.
When Amor the next day addresses the promise, her father denies ever having given it.
“I’m already paying for her son’s education. Must I do everything for her?”
Besides, it’s 1986. Apartheid is in full swing and black people are banned from owning property.
Set in South Africa in the run of forty years, The Promise, Damon Galgut’s nineth novel, explores questions of privilege and guilt, of expectations and obligations in changing times. Moving from the final days of apartheid to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s corrupt presidency, Galgut tells the story of the Swart family in Pretoria, proud descendants of the Vortrekkers, as they struggle with the loss of entitlement.
The Swarts are “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” Galgut writes, “holding on, holding out.” The mother, Rachel, a Jewish woman converted to Anglican faith and back again, her Afrikaans husband Mannie, owner of a reptile park, and their three teenage children Amor, Astrid, and Anton are a fractured family in a fractured nation. What they share is feeling betrayed by a country that at one point held so much promise for them.
Damon Galgut, who was born in Pretoria 1963 and now lives in Capetown, has a first hand experience of growing up in apartheid, and the optimism when South Africa’s transitioned into the Rainbow nation. “The sense of promise that we had in 1994 was palpable. And that promise has pretty much dissipated,” Galgut says.
The novel’s four chapters are set roughly a decade apart, each one focusing on a funeral held in a different political era and in a different spirit. As much as snapshots of a moment in time, they are elaborate, intimate portraits that document the inward and outward changes of not only of the Swarts family, but of the entire nation.
A vast cast of characters drift through the book, some even unrelated to the plot. There is for example the hallucinating homeless, whose name might or might not be Bob, who kidnaps the narration only to seamlessly pass if back to the main characters a few pages later. “In a great passing of time, everyone is equally important. South Africa is not a country that can be spoken for with a single voice,” Galgut recently said in a talk for University of Capetown. “We are a discordant chorus; but we are a chorus.”
The Promise’s side characters are ordinary people, and they are mostly white. South African society, almost thirty years after the fall of apartheid, is still a segregated society. Galgut makes a point of not penetrating the psyches of black people.“This is a book about a white South African family,” Galgut said. “But at the centre of the story is a black woman.” This might be why he named his protagonists Swarts, the Afrikaans word for black.
The novel’s omniscient, free-floating narrator is a puckish, volatile and often mischievous voice that hops between characters, slips into their thoughts and reveals the sordid details of their past. He (or she) doesn’t spare us the morbid, corporal details of neither the novel’s four deceased, nor the (more or less) bereaved. Amor’s first period, painstakingly happening during her mother’s funeral, is as elaborately described as an undertaker’s inability to hold his water during ceremony.
“Such release! Nothing joins a man to the earth more completely than an umbilical arc of hot yellow urine”
And there is little patience for the elderly lady who washes corpses at the morgue and takes a suppository against a migraine.
“No need to dwell on the image of the old woman with her knickers around her ankles and her finger up her fundament”
Not even in the Swarts’ farmhouse is exempted from the indignity of its bodily functions.
“The house is empty at this moment. It’s been deserted for a couple of hours, apparently inert but making tiny movements, sunlight stalking through these rooms, wind rattling the doors, expanding here, contracting there, giving off little pops and creaks and burps, like any old body. It seems alive, an illusion common to many buildings, or perhaps to how people see them. . . . But nobody is here to witness it, nothing stirs, except for the dog in the driveway, leisurely licking his testicles.”
Centered on death and demise, the Promise is still intensely funny, a hilarious book that pinpoints the absurd, the laughable in the tragic. Black humour seems a South African speciality, as comedian Trevor Noah once explained. In a nation where people have few shared experiences, politics is the only thing that unites them, rr rather, the frustration about it, and the misery that results from it, and the humour the last resort. Here’s a stereotypical South African joke to drive home the point:
In Toronto I saw a bumper sticker on a parked car that read: “I miss South Africa.” So I broke the window, took the radio and left a note that read: “I hope this helps.”
When we meet the Swarts in the first chapter, Amor is the family’s ugly duckling, while her sixteen-year-old Astrid is absorbed by her new femininity and her recent loss of virginity. Their nineteen-year-old brother Anton, serving the South African army as a teenage conscript, has his own demons to fight.
Military conscription was compulsory in apartheid South Africa from 1968 onwards. It was part of a “total response” to the looming dangers of communism as socialist republics like Angola or Tanzania emerged on the map. About 600,000 young white men had to undergo the de-humanizing military training, which turned them into pawns or agents of the fascist regime, by either breaking them, or radicalizing them. Galgut himself served the South African army for two years. Later, in 1983, he joined a white anti-apartheid movement that campaigned for the end of conscription.
By the mid-1980s, as anti-apartheid resistance intensified and South Africa found itself in a state of emergency, soldiers were deployed at home to quell riots and uprisings. Many of these riots now feature prominently in South African national identity, such as the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which hundreds of black school children were killed.
In the book, Anton, sent to control a local uprising in a township, fatally shoots a black woman the day his mother dies at home from cancer.
I have lost my mother, he says.
Lost her?
I shot her with my rifle, to protect the country.
Anton is the only family member to support little Amor in her quest that “the promise” will get fulfilled. Yet, it appears, he only does so to irritate his father. The funeral ends in dispute. The next day, Anton deserts the army, forsaking his future.
Anton, the firstborn, the only son. He is anointed, to what he doesn’t know, but the future is his. What is it you want? To travel, to learn, to write poems and lead nations, he wants to grab hold of everything, of all it is possible, he wants to eat the world. But a tiny sourness at the back of this throat seems always to have been there, though his life is pure and mild as milk. Wherefrom this curdling? There is a lie at the heart of everything and I have just discovered it in myself. Spit it out. What is wrong with you, man? Nothing is wrong with me. Everything is wrong with me.
“Apartheid was set up to serve somebody like Anton,” Galgut said in an interview with the Guardian in November 2021. “Without any effort he could have stepped into the shoes of privilege and power. I think that promise has probably faded for white males in South Africa, which is not a terrible thing.”
When we meet the Swart family again, in 1995, the family unites when Manie, the father, is in a coma at the ICU. The born-again Christian was trying to perform a publicity stunt in his reptile zoo, when he was bitten by a snake, of all things. Amor, now an attractive but enigmatic young woman, returns from her new home, London.
The view from the taxi window is a bit amazing. She doesn’t consciously know it but there is a festive air outside, because yesterday was a public holiday, Youth Day, nineteen years since he Soweto uprising, and today it’s the Rugby World Cup semifinals, South Africa is playing France later, and the pavements throb and throng with bodies. Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting causally about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!
It is indeed to a different world Amor returns. Apartheid has passed the previous year and South Africa is now the newly democratic, buoyant rainbow nation under President Nelson Mandela. Rugby, once a sport exclusively reserved for the Afrikaners and hence symbol of apartheid, has become a unifying force in the new nation. The national team, the Springboks, has for the first time a black player in their ranks. After having been isolated and excluded from the international sports community due to the sanctions against the apartheid regime, the 1995 World Cup was hosted and won by South Africa, and for the first time white and black South Africans cheered for the same team. The country is still in a frenzy over the Bokkies, the Springboks, even though they are still a dominantly white team.
Astrid, mother of twins, is now an overweight, unhappy housewife, living in suburban Pretoria. Anton, living under cover in his girlfriend’s Johannesburg flat, is an aspiring writer and accomplished alcoholic. He travels home to visit his father in the ICU.
Pa is in the far corner, all sorts of tubes running into him, though they give the impression of running the other way, out, sucking the vitality from inside him to power some different system. He looks like something crumpled, shucked -off, under the green sheets. Not just skin, but close to it. More battered than I remembered.
“I’ll just leave you for a minute” the hard-looking noise says.
She twitches the curtains around him, but not enough to block out the whole ward. Anton can see a black man in the next bed, bandaged up like a mummy. Verwoerd must be spinning in his grave, can’t believe they haven’t changed the name of the hospital yet. The man groans aloud from inside the wrappings, not quite a word, unless it’s in a foreign language, the language of pain. Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.
A right-wing Afrikaner nationalist, Hendrik Verwoerd is considered the architect of apartheid. His term as Prime Minister of South Africa ended prematurely in 1966, when he was stabbed in Parliament by a political contrahent. That the transition from apartheid to democracy was peaceful was indeed improbable, given the high aggression potential on both sides. But Nelson Mandela was a unifying charismatic character, who urged all fellow Black South Africans to embrace their historic oppressors, and all South Africans to move beyond their dark past.
The third chapter, and third funeral takes place in the years of Thabo Mbeki’s presidency, South Africa’s the post-honeymoon years. Astrid, now in her second unhappy marriage, is having an affair with her husband’s business partner, a black politician.
Truth is, Astrid finds him, i.e. the politician, almost unbearably sexy. Her nostrils quiver when he comes near, her body wants to cleave for him. And it was never like this with a black man before! Not for her, anyway. The opposite, actually, Astrid always used to find blacks unattractive, but she’s noticed lately that they’ve started to carry themselves more confidentl, they dress and cut their hair in their own style, and she has to admit, it has an effect. Plus they’re not prejudiced against heftier women no longer in the first bloom of youth and are open to flirting with her.
Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela in 1999. The beginning of the new millennium was a period of sustained growth, and Mbeki, living on Mandela’s political capital, dwelled in his ideas of an African Renaissance – a new black and proud consciousness. Yet, the newly found wealth, both material and mental, was strangely reserved to a small elite around him. Mbeki also failed to address the two epidemics that crippled South Africa at the turn of the millennium: AIDS and crime. His refusal to import Western medicine but rely on unproven African remedies cost the lives of five million HIV-infected South Africans, almost all of them black town-ship dwellers. Crime rates rocketed to new heights, as did the electrified walls that still surround security-estates and suburban houses in South Africa.
Amor, estranged from her family, now lives in Durban where she works as a nurse in an HIV-ward. Anton is living with his wife in a sexually unfulfilled marriage at the farm, where, for the first time has to install electric fences around the property. Opportunistic Astrid, whose second husband has made a fortune with home security systems becomes victim of a car hijacking.
“Who are you?” she asks. “What do you want?”
The questions are not unreasonable, though in a certain sense Astrid has been waiting her whole life for this man.
My name is Lindile, he says. I want you to drive.
His name is Lindile, but that’s only one of his names. He’s also known as Hotstix and Killer, he’s that sort of person. At present he lives not far from here, but he’s lived in lots of places, he doesn’t stay anywhere for long, he touches down for a moment then floats on, he rolls and drifts through idnetities and cities, or they moves through him, like a current of air. Nothing permanent about him, nothing that lasts.
Lindile is in fact the only black person whose inner live is unrolled in The Promise.
Nothing he hasn’t handled before. A little easier eachg time not to feel anything. But he still becomes squeamish at critical moments, it’s a weakness in his nature he needs to subdue, and when the woman is finally looking down the barrel of his gun at the shrinking diameter of her life, it’s himself he’s so viciously cursing, not her. Come on, coward, do it, do it!
“It was more or less the time when I think personal security was becoming an issue for white South Africans.” Galgut said in interview last November. “It was a big one for Black South Africans for a very long time. But it’s a very recent arrival in the consciousness of the whities… But the black townships in this country have been hotbeds of crime and murder for a very long time. And white people didn’t really give much of a damn; it was only when it spilled over, after 1994, and started to affect everybody that I think white people suddenly realized, “Oh, it’s kind of terrible to be living like this.” And it is, of course, a strange, unnatural, horrible way for all of us to be living. And I hope we find a way to live differently. Not yet, apparently.”
The fourth chapter is set in the years of Jacob Zuma, with the country in tight grip of corruption, load shedding, and power- and water shortage. A generalized feeling of depression overshadows the entire country.
Anton wandering around his house. Power’s gone again, fourth time this week, and the generator’s run out of petrol, so everything’s off. He could do something useful with his hands, like fix the banister on the stairs or replace the broken tiles on the patio, but he’s not in the mood. Hardly ever these days, for anything.
It’s a public holiday, Reconciliation Day or whatever they call it lately, so the staff aren’t in. They’ve got wise to their rights and have been demanding extra pay for holidays, though what they really want is to stay home and get falling-down drunk. Same as me.
Jacob Zuma, who had once colluded to oust Thabo Mbeki from office, had to resign on charges of corruption in 2017. He is due to stand trial on corruption cases this year.
The book’s final chapter leaves Amor as the only Swart, and only heir to the farmland. She promptly proceeds to finally fulfil her mother’s promise and passes the little cabin to Salome. Yet, as it turns out, there lies a claim on the property by a ethnic tribe, who had once been expelled from the land. It is a cruel twist of fate but a probable one in a post-colonial country. IOUs of colonialism are not cashable. While Salome never seems to get what apparently belongs to her, Amor cannot shed what does to not belong to her. How do you give up your privilege, Galgut asks. “There’s no way you can hand it in, like at a cloakroom.”
As Amor visits Salome in the cabin to hand her the deeds of the cottage, she meets Salome’s son, Lukas, with whom she used to play when they were little. He has grown into a bald, pot-bellied angry man.
You don’t understand, it’s not yours to give. It already belongs to us. This house, but also the house where you live, and the land it’s standing on. Ours! Not yours to give out as a favour when your’re finished with it. Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.
In The Promise, Amor acts as the conscience of the family, whose failure to fulfil the promise is an expression of the moral bankruptcy of present society. Morally and historically, she is on the right side, but, so the book asks, does her saintly forgoing her heritage, her own uprooting change the system, and make this world a better place? Or does her lifestyle simply serve herself her own feeling of righteousness?
In the kaleidoscope of voices that make up the Promise, one remains conspicuously silent. It’s Salome’s, the book’s central figure, whose mind remains a black box to the reader. If we never learned anything about her, it is because – so the narrator scolds us – we never asked. The book’s strongest statement is hence the one it never spells out: Justice won’t be served until people like Salome – female, black, rural, uneducated – will be given a voice. Not a cottage.
The Promise won the Bookerprize in 2021.
Photos were taken in South Africa 2015-2020