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“She sometimes wonders whether they’d done the right thing, because she, too, is scared of being butchered in bed. Almost all white South Africans are. It’s a given. They’re all waiting for the night of the long knives. You never known when, but you know it’s coming. And then one night you go to bed around ten. You hear the old red setter barking outside, but you don’t bother to get up; you doze off again, so you don’t hear the mosquito screen on the kitchen window being peeled back, and you don’t hear someone climbing quietly into your house. You don’t hear him coming down the passage on his bare feet, and you don’t hear him easing open the bedroom door. All you remember, really, is the split second of terror when you wake up. Bennie, your husband, is thrashing around at your side, and there’s a dark figure looming over the bed. And then the hammer smashes into your temple, and the next thing you know you’ve woken up in a surreal horror movie. Blood is dripping all over the telephone, the children are screaming, and your husband is tottering around in circles, drenched in blood, looking for his guns. You’re trying to phone the doctor, but you can’t remember how to dial” You could easily believe, after hearing that passage, that I have just quoted a horror scene from a fiction book. Unfortunately, this is real life. That is the story of the Hammer Man, a black man in South Africa who stole into people’s houses, attempting to kill them with a standard claw hammer. Thankfully, the above couple survived. But some were not so lucky. Racism in South Africa has existed for many years, and the two books that I have read, ‘The Power of One’ by Bryce Courtenay and “My Traitors Heart” by Rian Malan, both cover this topic, in different ways. Both these books have the common theme of racism in South Africa, yet they are contrasting in their views and stories. Power of One is a fiction book, about a young boy growing up in South Africa, telling of the trials and tribulations of a young boy, Peekay, as seen through his eyes. In the story, blacks are shown to be the suppressed race, who have accepted their fate. Yet Peekay is the shining light in their life, and is able to do amazing and wonderful things, such as bringing all the different blacks tribes together, to unite as one.
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