A dry white season

A dry white season (1979) by Andre Brink The novel focuses on the death during detention of a man wrongly suspected of being a black activist. The novel challenges apartheid, depicting the transformation of a ruling class Afrikaner's opposition to the governing white supremacist regime. The novel was initially banned in South Africa, though Brink had managed to get 3,000 copies published through an underground press.

Quotes

 * accept full responsibility
 * page 55
 * I have tried to accept that responsibility one owes to one’s society and one’s time
 * Page 18
 * an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies” that would develop into “the most elaborate racial edifice the world had ever witnessed
 * Page 54
 * first-world infrastructure and a third-world labour force
 * Page 241
 * The biggest mistake the black world ever made was to assume that whoever opposed apartheid was an ally. For a long time the black world has been looking only at the governing party and not so much at the whole power structure as the object of their rage
 * Page 139
 * arson, rape and bloody revolution
 * Page 271
 * restricted to King William’s Town, forbidden to speak in public or to write for publication or to be quoted or to be present with more than one person at a time
 * Page 141
 * Familiar social barriers to communication between upper and lower classes are reinforced in South Africa, both by racial distinctions and by regulations which discourage the entry of Whites into Black townships. Many leading local Whites who are familiar with London, Paris and New York have never set foot in Soweto.
 * Page XIX
 * drab houses of sprawling Black Soweto and the segregated areas where the Coloureds and Indians [were] required to live
 * XV
 * not yet a city because it lack[ed] cohesion and the normal range of urban anemities
 * Page 173
 * Instructions have been given to maintain law and order at all costs,
 * Page 19
 * barely enough for a shake of the head
 * Page 9
 * they’ve taken it all from me. Nearly everything. Not much left. But they won’t get that. You hear me? If they get that there would have been no sense at all
 * Page 13
 * in the crowd surrounded and stormed by the police
 * Age 41
 * of natural causes
 * Page 46
 * what good can it do [to keep looking], Gordon?” Gordon responds: “It can do nothing, Baas. But a man must know about his children…. I cannot stop before I know what happened to him and where they buried him. His body belongs to me. It’s my son’s body
 * Page 49
 * on blocks about a yard apart, with half-bricks tied to their sexual organs
 * Page 50
 * he [is] taken away by the Special Branch [security police]. And with him, the affidavits [disappear] without a trace
 * Page 51
 * in the end even the shrubs disappear … and day after day there’s the sun burning away whatever remains
 * Page 30
 * all its multitudes of rooms, some dark, some dusky, some blindingly light, with men standing astride on bricks, weights tied to their balls
 * Page 75
 * why do I go ahead by writing it all down here? … Prodded, possibly, by some dull, guilty feeling of responsibility towards something Ben might have believed in: something man is capable of being but which he isn’t very often allowed to be?I don’t know.Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I know nothing about it.
 * Page 316
 * Whether I like it or not … I am white. This is the small, final, terrifying truth of my broken world. I am white. And because I’m white I am born into a state of privilege. Even if I fight the system that has reduced us to this I remain white, and favoured by the very circumstances I abhor…. [Yet] what can I do but what I have done? I cannot choose not to intervene: that would be a denial and a mockery not only of everything I believe in, but of the hope that compassion may survive among men.
 * Page 306