This girl, for example, white, pretty, consumed by her own vanity and the need to escape from a life of numbing boredom, will be responsible, some will argue, for the dispatch of one more young African life to perdition. Such a view is quite mistaken. Veronica is responsible, of course, in a way, but only marginally, symbolically, responsible. The bearer of a white skin and the bearer of the flesh and blood of a gypsy, the bearer also, if I may so add, of a curse and a wound of which, not being very bright, she was not particularly aware, this English girl has simply been an instrument in whom is revealed in its most flagrant form the rot and corruption of a society that has cut itself off entirely from the rest of humanity, from any possibility for human growth.

With very conscious echoes of To kill a mockingbird and L'Étranger, this is framed as a first-person account from the condemned cell by a young Zulu man, Sibiya, who has been convicted of raping a white woman, Veronica, whom he has met after they exchanged glances across the buffer strip between the "Whites" and "Non-Whites" sections of a Durban beach. According to him, they have been playing a silent but mutually-understood flirting game with each other for some weeks, each enjoying the power of their own sexual attraction and the frisson of its forbiddenness for the other. When they eventually get each other so wound up that they end up in her bed together, they are interrupted by white friends of hers, and she accuses him of rape to avoid being prosecuted under the Immorality Acts herself. Her version, of course, is that it's all in his imagination, that she had never even looked at "that native" before he broke into her house.

Obviously we're meant to be uncomfortable with this: Nkosi is a writer who loves to provoke. He knows perfectly well that liberal, western readers in the 1980s aren't going to trust a narrator who is an accused rapist and not only never lets his alleged victim speak for herself, but also accuses her of being of loose morals and "not very bright". He exploits that, to make us ask ourselves if we distrust Sibiya more than Veronica because he's black, or even because he has been convicted by what is obviously a farcically prejudiced court.

There's a lot of rather black comedy in the book: in court, where the prosecuting attorney has the wonderful name "Kakmekaar" (sorry, you need to understand Dutch or Afrikaans for this) and where the official interpreter, provided by the court to maintain the legal fiction that "natives" can't understand English or Afrikaans, solemnly tells the judge that the Zulu language has no word for "orgies". The judge exclaims, "Good gracious, man! Are you trying to tell the court that your people had never heard of orgies before the white man came to this continent?" Nkosi makes the most of the prurience inherent in a rape trial: there's a lot more talk about the enormous size of Sibiya's penis than is strictly necessary, and it's clear that many of those in court are enjoying it. The bleak comedy continues in the condemned cell, where Sibiya is being interviewed by the Swiss Freudian criminologist, Dr Dupré, who wrong-headedly seeks for symbols in everything Sibiya tells him about his early life or about his encounter with Veronica.

An unsettling book, as it's meant to be, and a clever and provocative one. But it seems to be kicking in an open door: by the time it appeared, the Immorality Act provisions against interracial sex had already been repealed; segregation on beaches lingered on in theory until 1989, but in many places the authorities stopped enforcing it in the early eighties. ( )

Het verhaal van een jonge zwarte man in Zuid-Afrika die wordt beschuldigd van verkrachting van een jonge blanke vrouw, uiteraard tegen het decor van de apartheid. ( )