It’s a dizzying ride, one on which Malan serves as an expert, if somewhat curmudgeonly, guide.
Malan’s essays capture the transition in all its dysfunction and glory-from the African National Congress’ corruption scandals to the nation’s joy over winning the 1995 rugby cup from rumblings of communist revolution to the skyscrapers of booming capitalism from vigilante killings and mob violence to Nobel Peace Prizes and chi-chi literary festivals in Franschhoek. Whereas his first book, the best-selling My Traitor’s Heart, tackled the country’s apartheid past-including the history of his own family, a prominent Afrikaner clan-Malan’s new collection spans the years between 19, when South Africa oscillated between the extremes of “terror and ecstasy,” sometimes in the same week, as it lurched into its brave new world. The Lion Sleeps Tonight is the result of those many years of essayistic crying in the wilderness, the hero of our tale and one of South Africa’s most prominent journalists.
#Wimoweh beast free
He watched his homeland hold its first free elections, issued prophecies-some prescient, others wildly off the mark-about his country’s future trajectory, and wrote a wealth of great pieces for places like Rolling Stone and Esquire, making a few friends and a lot of enemies in the process. Shacking up in the hopping Jo’burg satellite of Yeoville, he sallied forth to do ideological battle over rounds of beers with all manner of leftist hacks and real revolutionaries. But the idyll was not to last, and when he returned to his South African veldt in the late ‘80s, he encountered a country on the brink of monumental, messy, historic change. Our story begins in darkest (as they say) Africa, where a young Boer languished in the whites-only suburbs of the 1960’s, listening to rebellious longhair rock bands and dreaming-like a true Voortrekker-of an escape from his “hell of boredom and conformity.” He grew up, got a gig at an alternative weekly in L.A., fell in love with long-form New Journalism, and bummed about America for eight years.
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