We must cherish Rian Malan. Just as the bien pensants subside into semi-comatose acceptance of South Africa’s bewildering contemporary contradictions, the author of My Traitor’s Heart shuffles back onstage to scour the mind and heart with an enormously energising selection of creative journalistic observation in Resident Alien.
It’s a hugely refreshing exercise in times dominated by mealy-mouthed public debate.
While our public broadcaster interviews itself lovingly in the mirror of political expediency, Malan plays the classic investigative reporter, often risking life and limb to produce an intensely readable range of features on astonishing ventures into the interiors of remarkable human beings. While worthy folk are dangerously distracted by the vocabulary of political correctness, he has the courage to say what he sees and hears. And feels and believes.
The insights are sometimes poetic, the research is impressive and he shares lots of disgraceful fun with the reader. Malan is cunning enough to anticipate a certain amount of personal criticism: he confesses to a thread of sentimentality here and there – and he exploits a fine sense of theatre to dramatise a memorable cast of characters.
Sometimes melancholy obtrudes – but then, who wouldn’t blub at some of the baffling excesses his curiosity reveals?
Most readers perceive him as a detribalised Afrikaner. Alien reveals the shock-horror truth that his mum was English-speaking, and mad keen to flourish the Union Jack. There are those who imagine that his often acid castigation of the South African rooinek vulgaris constitutes deep-seated Afrikaner prejudice against the sons of Empire. Truth be told, as far as Malan is concerned, it’s a pox on all our warring benighted South African houses. Though he does appear to be partial to Zulus.
One of the most riveting features is titled “Those Fabulous Alcock Boys”, and it tells a vigorous tale. The two blonde Alcock boys were raised in a Zulu mud hut by formidably idealistic parents who decided that their offspring should be taught the arts of survival the ancient African way. The startling outcome? Read the book.
By contrast, “The Last Afrikaner” presents the astonishing survival, culturally intact, of an ancient white dame, forgotten by history, somewhere near Mount Kilimanjaro. She has honey-coloured sons and grandchildren, lives in a primitive hut, but continues to define herself as a boer.
Malan marches to his own drum. The cover picture makes him look like a miserable git, but he is a beguiling story-teller. The adjective “passionate” is grievously abused in South Africa these days (job ads seek “passionate sausage-makers”, and apparently passionate municipal clerks proliferate), but it is appropriate as applied to the walkabout Malan.
He is a maverick, but not for the sake of it, perhaps moulded by the On the Road likes of Jack Kerouac and his ilk.
Now he is grown to wry wisdom, but remains a fierce enemy of bullshit. Let the PC beware. | 
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