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    Midlands: A Very South African Murder
    Unavailable
    Midlands: A Very South African Murder
    Unavailable
    Midlands: A Very South African Murder
    Ebook379 pages5 hours

    Midlands: A Very South African Murder

    By Jonny Steinberg

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the spring of 1999, in the beautiful hills of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, a young white farmer is shot dead on the dirt road running from his father's farmhouse to his irrigation fields. The murder is the work of assassins rather than robbers; a single shot behind the ear, nothing but his gun stolen, no forensic evidence like spent cartridges or fingerprints left at the scene. Journalist Jonny Steinberg travels to the Midlands to investigate. Local black workers say the young white man had it coming. The dead man's father says that the machinery of a political conspiracy has been set into motion, that he and his neighbours are being pushed off their land. Initially thinking that he is to write about an event in the recent past, Steinberg finds that much of the story lies in the immediate future. He has stumbled upon a festering frontier battle, the combatants groping hungrily for the whispers and lies that drift in from the other side. Right from the beginning, it is clear that the young white man is not the only one who will die on that frontier, and that the story of his and other deaths will illuminate a great deal about the early days of post-apartheid South Africa. Sifting through the betrayals and the poisoned memories of a century-long relationship between black and white, Steinberg takes us to a part of post-apartheid South Africa we fear to contemplate. Midlands is about the midlands of the heart and mind, the midlands between possession and dispossession, the midlands between the past and present, myth and reality. Midlands is a tour de force of investigative journalism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJonathan Ball Publishers
    Release dateNov 22, 2010
    ISBN9781868424054
    Unavailable
    Midlands: A Very South African Murder
    Author

    Jonny Steinberg

    JONNY STEINBERG is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. He is a two-time winner of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, and an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes. Until 2020, he was professor of African studies at Oxford University. He currently teaches part-time at the Council on African Studies at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and is visiting professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg.

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    Reviews for Midlands

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      After a son of white farmer is murdered sniper style on the edge of the farm, Steinberg interviews the family of the dead, and the tenants of the farm, and realizes that the murder didn't happen in a vacuum, could have many different causes, none of them easy to explain.More than anything, this is a story about how little black and white South Africans understand each other in the post apartheid era. Both sides believe stereotypes about the other, and blame the other for the problems, crimes and death that is ravaging the midlands and the whole of South Africa. Interesting read for anyone interested in South African current affairs.
    • 5/5
      Midlands is a scary book - if you're a South African. Steinberg investigates the murder of a young, white farmer in the deep, rural KwaZulu-Natal midlands. The killing happens in the late '90s, a good few years after the democratic transition, against the background of a spate of particularly brutal farm murders. Midlands is scary because the police are dysfunctional and the killers are still at large, but particularly because it unblinkingly traces the fault lines of a riven society. The peasant Zulus, mere tenants on what was formerly their land, appear to be engaged in a century-long war of attrition with the white landowners. The cultures are so different that any perceptions about the same event are worlds apart; they send signals to each other that are regularly misinterpreted; a chance remark by the former landowner is accepted as a de facto transfer of ownership by the tenants; the protagonists inhabit different ethical and legal frameworks. And so it goes. It seems that even the killing is merely a signal to the father, the landowner. To the tenants it appears to be a perfectly acceptable signal, a logical consequence, a simple message. Similarly, the (white) police kill a suspect with seeming impunity.As Steinberg presses an old Zulu about the possible reasons for the farmer's assassination, the old man remarks that it would not have happened during the apartheid era. Why? "Because the people still had hope", he says. Nothing emphasises the vast gulf between black, rural expectations and current reality more that this statement. Clearly, the saga of land restitution has a long and bloody road to run yet.With this week's assassination of David Rattray, an Anglo-Zulu war historian, friend of Prince Charles and much-loved raconteur, at his Rourke's Drift home, the issue has once again been rammed into the South African consciousness. The ANC government, having recently denied that "crime is out of control", is under fire. The difference is that David Rattray was famous and a respected person amongst white and Zulu alike...