Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it.

Placed at the end of most novels these words would probably sound melodramatic or self-aggrandising or even slyly apologetic ('I'd have liked to have done more but …'). As the last words of André Brink's A Dry White Season, however, they're a quite proper reminder that in certain places at certain times the subtleties we normally demand from fiction seem almost beside the point: all that matters is that the truth be set down, preferably with directness and simplicity. It's not a position we'd expect to be taken by British and American novelists, most of whom feel (perhaps mistakenly) that their societies are...