Review: “The Promise,” by Damon Galgut

This tale is ostensible a straight forward account of the fates of the three off-springs of a white South African family during the transfer of political power from imperial to Black South Africans and Afrikaans in the twentieth century.

Though the narrator plays with the book’s storytelling style directly addressing the reader from time to time, The Promise is basically the story of Amor, the youngest of three Afrikaans south Africans. The book’s chapters are headed Ma, Pa and the names of the three children: Amor, Astrid and Anton.

Amor suffers a devastating accident as a child. She is struck by lightening when walking on a nearby hillock. The event permanently damages one of her feet and forecasts her life. Though she leaves her family’s estate and lives in Durbin as a young adult, Amor never forgets the promise made to her by her mother. Rachel has wrested a promise from her husband Lanie. She has asked that Salome, who cared for the children as their nursemaid, be given the house and land on which she lives.

In addition to the children, their parents, aunts and uncles, the cast is rounded out by Alwyn Simmers, the money-grubbing minister of the Dutch Reformed Church that sits on the estate.

The temper of the story-telling voice is bolstered by a snickering kind of cynicism. One character cries like “a tomato being opened.” Another is described as having a “crimp in his soul which always brings out the biblical in him.” Inanimate objects take on life: “the house is empty, inert, making tiny movements.”

References to South African history — the Soweto uprising of 1976 — and literary works — Slouching Toward Bethlehem-– make this work a multifaceted read for its intended public, the South African audience, who vividly remember the aftermath of the nonracial, democratic elections of 1994 when the the country’s Black majority took power.

Secondarily, it is an interesting and saddening introduction to the period for those of us who are less informed.