Karoo Boy: A Book Review
Moses concludes his story, their first meeting, with profound wisdom that allows Douglas to move forward with his life despite the loss of his twin and his dad: "Douglas, I think this dying of your twin brother, the going away of your father, was the beginning of your bundu time, the time of your hardship. You are in the in-between world, when the spirits will try to catch you. It is a lonely, hurting time. But you will come out of it a man. Look at you. Though you bleed, you do not cry. A pity your father does not see you become a man" (p. 86).
The relationship between elderly black man and young white boy is pivotal to the book's overarching message of non-racialism. In addition, of course, Douglas needs a fatherly figure that can help him sort through his emotions of grief. I had to wonder how frequently you might run into exactly such perfectly politically correct white people in South Africa in 1977. Several times, Africans make political comments to Douglas that few Africans would say to a white young man whom they barely know. It would have been dangerous for them to speak so freely and, unless the book's descriptions left it out, Douglas didn't go around wearing a huge placard that maintained his open minded and nonracial attitude toward African-white relationships. I'm not saying these things didn't happen, only that I wondered at the frequency they occurred in the book.
Further, certain details in the book fail in authenticity. According to book reviewer Jane Rosenthal for the Mail & Guardian Online, "...As an accurate reflection of the 1970s, it falls short. A couple of examples: the Hard Rock Café in Sea Point did not exist until the 1990s. And Moses recounts how, when he was a mine-worker, he and his friends would dream of a future when they would drink whiskey and 'see the girls shake their skinny white ass at us.' It is so unlikely that Moses would use this phrase - 'ass' has only come into South African English in the past decade or so, and then in the mouths of American-influenced youth" (http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2004/200...
The strongest part of Blacklaws's writing-or perhaps my favorite part-is his use of words when writing descriptions. He frequently surprised me with his turns of phrases-e.g., at a moment of delighted surprise, Douglas describes the "cappuccino" feeling in the pit of
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