Nape’a Motana’s Son-in-law of the Boere is a novel that would best be thought of as a ‘work in progress’, which is highly unfortunate considering the vast potential it had with such a topical and thought-provoking subject.
It’s a Black and White Matter
Son-in-law of the Boere is a story which tries to illustrate the highest level of cultural peace and acceptance, by giving the account of a love affair which takes place between a black man and a white Afrikaner woman only a few years after the official fall of Apartheid.
Through their mutual incorporations of certain aspects of the other culture, Kgoroto Mashobohleng (also known as KK) and Katryn van der Merwe shock and occasionally enrage their respective cultures, all the while remaining generally unmoved in the face of their love for one another.
A Comic Without Pictures
The essence of the plot itself has great a potential to blossom into something completely engaging and which could even be thought of as a South African reworking of Romeo and Juliet. Sadly
While not hopelessly drab or mundane, the text is insubstantial, impressing on the reader much the same feeling as would a comic book, except without the pictures to attract the eye; the pace of the novel is commendable, and the writing allows one to slip through, but there is regrettably very little to look at along the way.
Occasionally there is a certain attention paid to detail, but these details are either insipid or inane, creating no atmosphere and leaving one scene very much the same as another. The electric tension which could be mined from such a taboo situation in the eyes of both cultures is barely even scratched, and the feeling of the novel would have been more or less unchanged had both the characters been black or white.
Strange Dialogue and Bad Acting
Perhaps the very weakest point of the novel, and one which seems to underscore all the other flaws, is the dialogue. Conversations within the book are frequently awkwardly handled, not to the effect where tension is created between the characters, but rather to that where the reader feels the interaction is completely non-genuine. Exclamation marks are so often thrown about, particularly on the part of KK, that the lines come off sounding like the staged utterances of a bad actor.
Unluckily, the one aspect of Nape’a Motana’s writing which in the beginning showed a potential for a seasoning of the text, soon became another factor in the downfall of the character interaction: the appearance of proverbs at the start of the book was a promising touch; they were effective to a degree and were generally very good at describing a point. However, it soon becomes apparent to the reader that almost every person in the novel is scripted as a poet, with waxing lyrical statements flying about frequently in conversations from every mouth, which creates an effect one might be tempted to describe as utterly bizarre.
Characterisation will Suffer
It is inevitable then that with hindrances such as these, characterisation will suffer. It is very difficult to engage with any of the characters within Son-in-law of the Boere beyond their superficial descriptions. One may be told bluntly the various emotions of an individual, but there is little to no substance to support these statements which would cause the reader to see the character as anything more than a bunch of random descriptions. Proclamations of love from the two protagonists are often so unfounded, that were KK and Katryn to hurl hatred at one another in the very next breath, the contradiction would hardly be noticed.
The pity felt at the overall disappointment of Son-in-law of the Boere is made all the more tangible by the fact that one can see the writing was not beyond hope: in the basic structure of the written word and in the story one can see the ingredients for a fantastic novel, and had a little more time and craft been spent in the perfecting of the prose, Son-in-law of the Boere would have executed an excellent stirring of the thinking pot.
SenseOnline Comment
We gave this book to a black writer to read and her comments were virtually identical to Matthew’s. For us it is a tragedy to be so scathing of an obviously talented writer, especially considering the problem lies with the publisher – Umuzi, in this case, but all South African publishers are guilty of rushing black writers into print without first doing their job.
As Matthew says, this book had vast potential. This is now lost because of sloppy publishing, which most black writers are victims of. It is also not fair on the small buying public who support South African writers. And, most of all, we are not going to develop a culture of reading in this country until publishers wake up to their duty of ‘perfecting the prose’. This is especially pertinent of this publisher who belongs to a group that owns an online writing school dedicated to just that.
