ANNOUNCEMENT: My debut book is here

Rage and Love: A Memoir of White South Africa in an Age of Destruction

Dec 23, 2023

It has been a work of the past two years, and finally it is here: my first book, a work deeply personal in which I spill my guts to you.

It is available immediately on Amazon.

I am also pleased to announce that I will be giving digital copies to all of my paid subscribers.

Become a paid subscriber below to have the book sent to your inbox.

Or simply purchase via Amazon.

From the blurb:

'I contemplate my heritage, my home, the beauty of my country, and all its possibilities, with love in my heart. Yet I rage in that same heart that so much goodness and glory have been so carelessly discarded.'
Rage and Love is the story of a society’s descent into madness and destruction – and the beauty and fire that still live on.
It is the story of a white South African living through the end of apartheid, the rise of rainbow politics, and the covid event's attack on youth and joy; a memoir of a life lived in privilege and heartbreak, in vitality and decay, in a world frequently denounced but rarely understood.
But this story has resonance beyond its borders. In many ways, South Africa, in all its anarcho-tyranny and politically correct self-righteousness, is the vanguard of the West's future.
Rage and Love is therefore an elegy for what we have all lost – what has slipped through our fingers – and an exhortation to salvage what remains.

Please do also share with your wider network, not only for my own sake, but because I do sincerely believe this is a book worth reading.

As a taster, I would also like to share the book’s prologue with everyone, which is not merely a prologue, but a personal statement of belief (of a sort) for our time…

Yvoire

Just after the height of the covid madness, I found myself sitting on a carved stone bench, on a narrow, cool street in a medieval village in France that had been artificially preserved in time.

There were no cars. A castle and an old church hugged the beach where I had taken my three children swimming. The water was clear and cool.

Behind us were the Alps. Across the lake were the Jura Mountains. Beneath them lay our new home in Switzerland. We had left South Africa that year. Just outside the walls of the village were normal roads and modern noise, with hot tarmac and box buildings.

Centuries before this village had been built, Julius Caesar himself had travelled here to defeat the ancient predecessors to the modern Swiss, the Helvetians. This would launch his career as a great conqueror, who would bring to an imperial end a decaying Roman Republic.

Had he sat and stared out at this clear lake, as I was doing now? Through the great upheaval of the Dark Ages, the Roman world had transformed into the world of Christian Europe. And now? What was this world now?

In this time capsule, the people who walked past me struck me as unusual in their appearance. Every now and then, a healthy and beautiful young couple, dressed well, moved through the village. Most of the people, however, were overweight and covered in tattoos. One could see the weight of hoppy beer gathered in the bellies of women and men, a rotundity that did not denote cheerfulness but sagginess.

Sitting there, I felt the presence of the past, an entire epoch now an intruder in modernity, but not quite banished. The narrow streets and the cool stone of the buildings and walls seemed to breathe something fresh and foreign into me. This dead world was supposed to have been a product of old superstitions. But was this sense of beauty everywhere I looked, its craftsmanship, its reverence, truly a relic of pre-modern darkness? Was my own European heritage, a combination of Anglo-Saxon and Irish, with all its monasteries and architecture, something I truly should feel the need to repudiate, as a thing to cast away?

No, I unashamedly knew within my bones and blood that my heritage was good – that within its physical artefacts, a respect for matter shone through, a ‘technics’ that reached toward the eternal and infinite. Yes, even that heritage transposed into Africa was good. Were their sins in the lives of my fathers? Of course. I can criticise my fathers. But I cannot renounce them. No other culture even considers doing so. Why should I?

Secondly, I felt a revulsion for my present. The ink on bodies looked like dirt. Much of the clothing was deliberately torn or dishevelled. In our modern world of medical innovation, where was the sense of health and freshness?

I looked down at my hands. I felt the wire encased by the plastic of my mandatory mask. I was not wearing it. The sun was hot, the air fresh. Across the lake in Switzerland, I only had to wear it indoors, and my children did not have to wear masks at all. Here in France, masks were compulsory outdoors for everybody. Such is life in the age of settled science.

This plastic mask seemed a totem of what I felt. Here was progress. Here was a deep care for the individual in the modern age; the rational rule of experts; the loving rule of the great mother. But also – a lack of air. Litter. A product made in a dirty factory in the East, a product made to be disposable. A product deeply unhealthy, yet apparently designed to increase our longevity. A world of stultifying safety. I had already tried the popular experiment of exhaling tobacco smoke whilst wearing a mask, watching the wisps of white and grey surge outwards. The obviousness of the mask’s futility seemed to be the point.

As I sat there, looking at this mask, feeling the presence of the past in my surrounds, I found myself thinking back on my life so far.

I had three beautiful children, borne by a beautiful wife. I had grown up in white South Africa, amidst lush gardens and playing fields and rugged beaches. But life had not always been easy. I had experienced crime, family problems, car accidents, stress, and the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to – the mortal coil we all carry.

But throughout – a sense of beauty fading away, slipping through my fingers. I felt the lack.

As an English teacher, I had taught Brave New World to students, during which I had asked them to reflect on how close our world was to the tawdry, plastic, homogenous, decadent society of the future. Obviously, there were similarities, but to be honest, I had always felt as though I were exaggerating, that of course our world was still far off from losing all meaning in the face of the constant distraction of meaningless games and banal art.

In such a world, Aldous Huxley predicted that ‘most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution’ and that it is only a savage or an outcast, who will dare to say, ‘I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’ (How much better then to be a savage?)

As I sat there, it dawned on me that my generation was possibly destined to face a collapse of civilisation, beauty, and meaning. How many people were already trapped in the cults of gender transition, fake art, and safety? How many of us still felt a deep ache of ennui in our bones – a sense of adventure erased from our lives and our children’s future, as state tyranny grows, and state competence crumbles?

The love of servitude has been made shockingly obvious in our quiet submission to masks and mandatory vaccines – not because we all believed in the efficacy of these intrusions, but out of politeness, a sense that we needed to get along with each other beneath the authority of our hygiene regime. Covid and the monstrous response to it had smashed any old illusions that global leaders would be hesitant to cast away old freedoms and old standards if they felt they could get away with it. The mass compliance of the entire West had also confirmed Huxley’s predictions, that we would love servitude. But the current state of our world reminded me also of another story… the old story of the eschatological reign of a satanic beast, found in the biblical book, Revelation. Such musings had formerly been restricted to American televangelists, parsing the texts like old code. But here we were. How much more literally could these words have been fulfilled?

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

As I sat there in Yvoire, the codes and symbols that one was about to need to enter shops, cross borders, and do business, had not been created yet. But we all knew they were coming, and that we would comply as we had done with masks – and that we would comply again not based on scientific truth, but rather its distortion. The masks so obviously did not stop transmission, as obviously as the vaccines would not, and besides, why did we even want to stop transmission of a virus we would all inevitably get anyway? But this was the point for people like me, the rub of the whole thing. To so obviously force you to engage in an untruth is the ultimate demoralisation.

Somebody who had lived in this village as though it were real, and not a place of amusement and a source of curiosity, would surely be shocked by our paradoxical obsession with our health when we had all become so overweight, so lined with ink. Of course, we cannot go back. Of course, I knew I was being sentimental. Every age has its problems, its great failures, its great impositions on the common man. I think what bothered me most of all was that our impositions had come with such a smug self-righteousness. We felt proud of not being proud of our past. Our worship of science and progress had made us believe all our forebears had been ignorant.

I knew then I had to go back. I had to make sense of it all, for myself and others. What have we lost in my brief lifespan, as Europeans scattered in the colonial diaspora? What are our sins? What is our innocence?

I had grown up and come of age as a white, English-speaking, South African Christian man. In this new world, such an upbringing carried some kind of weight of enforced apology. Our time was up, apparently. My fellow white men said this more than anybody. It was our time to listen. It was our time to step back. We had raped and pillaged. It was time for other voices, for power to be shared.

But what kind of life was this? Who was this global umpire deciding such things, suggesting that a man’s entire earthly life, his one short span of breath, should be passed in apology, in grovelling, and in seeking only safety?

At times, this questioning has welled up within me as rage. At other times, it has caused despair.

Enough. I will not apologise. The country where I was born is indeed my country. My faith is great and beautiful. My people can take their place with any other peoples on earth. I want to live. I want to speak.

As I sat there, I knew I had been holding my breath for too many years now. I knew I had to write it all down. Not because I am important or interesting. But because my story is not my own, the story in me is the story of others far greater.

Hamlet said that the afterlife was ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. But perhaps that is true not only of the great future that is the afterlife, but also of the past, of my past, and of the entire past I felt as I sat on that bench. Yes, you cannot go back. But you can find the past all around you. The old idea that your ancestors’ blood was within you is no superstition. The present is only here because it contains the past.

Hamlet’s despair, which I want to avoid and overcome, was predicated upon the crumbling of his father’s house – a Denmark in which all was rotten, as incest and murder and plotting and spying overtook old loyalties. In this dislocation, Hamlet, despite being both son and heir, felt like an interloper in his own palace, as his low-life uncle took his father’s throne and wife. He was lost in a fracturing of time:

The time is out of joint – o cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.

But that is a matter of perspective. Time can perhaps be redeemed. Being born need not be a burden, the conditions of your birth need not be a curse. They can instead be an opportunity, a great adventure, even though one loses much along the way.

I will write now of such things.

The Amazon link for the book.

Merry Christmas. Thank you for all the support this past year.

Onwards and upwards.