The Smell of Apples

Marnus Erasmus loves history. He roams about Cape Town’s National Museum with its elaborate dioramas that depict the nearly two centuries of European presence in southern Africa, valorizing the white settlers and dehumanizing the indigenous Bantus. Whatever civilizations and cultures thrived in southern Africa before the European colonization are simply irrelevant to the boy. We understand that the goal of what Marnus calls “history” was to create a narrative of inevitability and a justification for the imposition of white rule on a black civilization.

Marnus’s award-winning school essay on the history of the white South African military is unsettling for us, the readers, as it is little more than Afrikaner agitprop: The whites struggled to wrest South Africa from the savagery of the bush natives, a mission God himself blessed. Marnus listens to heated discussions at the dinner table about South Africa’s precarious position in the world community, a precarity his father claims is the result of South Africa’s defiant stand against the threat of the black majority population, and of the country’s belief that apocalyptic chaos will be unleashed should “they” be accorded political, economic, and social equality. In animated diatribes, his father brainwashes his son about the history of his own family; the family’s flight from Tanzania becomes a skewed narrative of moral outrage over the family’s displacement.