That night, this life: essays from a South African story

Abstract

On 1 May 1993, the same year the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, masked gunmen shot and maimed a young man in his neighbourhood bar in East London, South Africa. He is Neville Beling, 20 years old that night and one of seven survivors permanently disabled while five others were shot dead. At the time, South Africa was in turmoil as its leaders negotiated a complex transition to democracy. Yet, unusually, the Highgate Hotel Massacre was never claimed by a political grouping, and nobody has ever applied for amnesty for the attack. These lacunae have left survivors with the additional devastation of questions with no answers. Ever since this attack on white civilians, Neville has wanted to know who the gunmen were and “why they done what they done”. In 1997, he asked the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During a mediation in 2003, he asked the supposed commander of the attackers – only to discover shocking information which altered the course of his life. When we met in 2006, he wanted me, then a journalist and teller of other people’s stories, to tell his. It is now 2025. He is 32 years older than his bullets, and only a little nearer knowing his truth. Meanwhile I, after almost two decades working alongside him, recognise that I am no longer his detached observer and that this is our story as well as South Africa’s. The work of creative nonfiction which constitutes the core of this doctoral submission tells this story via a series of essays, arriving ultimately, in the essaying tradition, at recognitions and insights which were not evident to me at the time of setting out. En route to new understandings and reckonings, the book explores aspects of broad South African themes which animate our evolving relationship and emerge from Neville Beling’s life story. These include truth, reconciliation, trauma, witnessing, narrative, pain, forgiveness, home, auto/biography, memory. They also include whiteness, for both Neville and I are white South Africans coming to postcolonial terms in the land that is our home. It is inimical to creative nonfiction that its practice foregrounds ethical considerations.