Amandla, a Novel

South Africa’s story

Amandla (meaning ‘power’) is a self-published novel by South African native Alix Jans. For full disclosure one should know that Alix is a friend of mine. But I hope that will not deter you from reading this review and the novel. Jans wrote the book as a way to leave information about his homeland and its history for his children. And the result is a clear-eyed, unforgiving story of his homeland. Yet for most of us who are not South African, it will also be a worthy read and with its historical accuracy, an education.

Amandla is a well-written historical novel about the rise of South Africa, beginning with the 1838 battle of Blood River. Here the greatly outnumbered Boers (almost exclusively of Dutch heritage) battled a determined Zulu tribe. The Boers (again, Dutch) saw three of their men wounded, while the Zulu warriors, charging directly into gunfire, suffered 3,000 casualties. This victory became, in the Afrikaner’s mind, the sign that they were intended to have the land, whether by fate or, more often, claiming God’s will.   

A chance meeting between Mandela’s father and one William De Beer leads to a misunderstanding and ensuing encounters haunt the novel to its end in what might be described as ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’ or perhaps ‘the sins of the father are visited upon the sons.’ 

From there the novel follows its three generations of fictional characters (mingled with historical figures) to the beginning of the twentieth century. As an interesting and effective device, Jans then uses a page and a half to summarily traverse the years from 1902 onward, and the story jumps to 1960 and the offspring of the earlier generation. Here is where Nelson Mandela first shows up, and as more of a Che Guevara revolutionary than the peace maker he became after decades in prison and as leader of the ANC party and South Africa itself.

Along the way we see the rise of apartheid which became the continuous and largely successful effort of the Afrikaner to subjugate more than 80 percent of the population known as the “Blacks.”

Jans does not shy away from complexity. He astutely brings in not only the Afrikaner/Black conflict, but also shows the role of the British (enemy to Afrikaner and Black alike) in an accurate (which means unflattering) way. On top of this, as the book evolves, we find the global impact of the larger Cold War, the fear of communism, the explosion of the civil rights movement, and other aspects of global events, giving the reader a view of these major elements of the twentieth century from another part of the world.

Just over 500 pages in length, Amandla is not a short undertaking. But the prose flow easily and the reader is quickly embedded in this historical tale and invested in its characters both fictional and historical. In the many lyrical sections of the narrative, we feel the depth of each character’s beliefs, whether good or evil, and this reminds us that while facts matter, what we believe is what gets lived.

Beginning with a prologue that one may wish to have known more about, the epilogue brings it full circle. In between, the heart of the story becomes a compelling and insightful read about South Africa. Moreover, Amandla provides a rich metaphor for other countries’ harsh journey to what some call “civilization.”