Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
As Rachel Swart lies dying in 1986 after a long bout with cancer, she coaxes a promise from her husband, Manie. He agrees to deed to their long-suffering Black house servant, Salome, the house she’s been living in all her life. Their younger daughter, Amor, overhears the exchange and presses her father at the funeral to fulfill the promise. But he denies having made it. As the title of Damon Galgut’s South African saga, The Promise, suggests, this conflict is the central thread in a story that will span four decades. And it symbolizes the dominant fault line in South African society as it emerges from apartheid less than a decade later.
A broken promise
The Swarts—Rachel, Manie, and their three children, Astrid, Anton, and Amor—are Afrikaners. They live a comfortable life on a farm near Pretoria, with Salome and other Black men and women working the farm and serving their daily needs. But Manie generates most of their income from a reptile farm he manages on their property. And nine years later, in 1995, one year into Nelson Mandela’s presidency, he dies of a snakebite. His funeral brings the three children back together for the first time in years. There, Amor attempts to persuade her siblings to honor their mother’s promise to Salome. But neither will agree to do so.
The Promise by Damon Galgut (2021) 256 pages ★★★★★
Winner of the Booker Prize
A family, and a nation, unravel
The three Swart children have taken diverging paths through life. Anton had become a soldier involved in suppressing Black anti-apartheid activities. Shaken when he murdered a woman at a demonstration, he had deserted and has been on the run for years when he surfaces for his father’s funeral. Astrid married a local man, gave birth to twins, and by 1995 is regretting it all. And Amor has been living in England. Their father’s will leaves the farm and the income from the reptile farm to the three of them equally—with no provision for Salome or any of the workers on the farm. But only Anton remains. Astrid lives apart with her twins, and Amor moves to Durban, where she becomes a nurse and goes to work in a hospital’s HIV ward.
Galgut’s story leaps ahead, nine years at a time, into South Africa’s future. First, under Thabo Mbeki, who famously denied the link between HIV and AIDS. Then under the corrupt rule of Jacob Zuma. All the while, as the bright promises of freedom after apartheid fall flat, one after another, the country descends into endemic violence. And the Swart family’s fortunes go into decline. When, at long last, Manie Swart’s promise is finally fulfilled, Salome is an old woman, and her son rejects the gift as meaningless.
Deserving the Booker Prize
Unlike so much of the literature that the Booker Prize has celebrated over the years—books that confuse experiments in language and structure with storytelling—this outstanding novel is fully deserving of the recognition it gained for its author. Damon Galgut’s style is majestic, his language fresh and evocative. And he clearly understands the nuances of the always-strained relations between Black and White in his native South Africa. The Promise is a novel to be savored for its prose and pondered for its message about the human condition.
About the author
Damon Galgut was born in 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa to a Jewish father and a mother who’d converted to Judaism. He attended the University of Cape Town, where he studied drama. His first novel appeared in 1982, when he was seventeen. He has since written a total of nine novels and four plays. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice before winning the award in 2021 for The Promise. Galgut is gay.
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