Ben Du Toit – a 53 years old schoolteacher in South Africa during apartheid. He would not be the first person, you would expect to stand up against the government for a black family. But towards the end of the story he asks himself: “But who are my people today?” which must be an expression of him no longer being sure, whether he is attached to, what used to be “his people” – the whites – or not. André Brink, the narrator, has stated that “A Dry White Season” is some kind of an autobiography, where he, of cause, is Ben Du Toit. So seen in that perspective Ben probably, like André Brink, has grown up in a conservative family where the apartheid system was the system, something you just did not question. But then suddenly something opens his eyes to the injustice of this system and he starts standing up against it. But though he fights the system, which in a larger perspective means fighting the whites, he still is one of them by his looks and his way of life. So he is caught in the middle. On one hand he sympathizes with the black people, but on the other he belongs to the “white society”. In the apartheid system you can not be both, it borders to the unthinkable. If you are a white you sympathize with the system and have the benefit from it. There simply is no middle way, so when he tries to live in both worlds, he is ejected. In “the white world” he is nearly seen as a traitor connecting with the enemy. This, of cause, makes the security police hunt him down, but also in the part of the story, where he has been in the paper comforting Emily, a bunch of people are phoning him to tell, how offending his behavior has been and how ashamed they are of him – even his own family does this. But also in “the black world” his behavior could cause him trouble. It is not described in this text, but it could be questioned, whether he is to be trusted being white.
Det er gratis at oprette en konto