SOURCE: Heyns, Michiel. “The Whole Country's Truth: Confession and Narrative in Recent White South African Writing.” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (spring 2000): 42-66.

In the following essay, Heyns analyzes how white authors writing in the post-apartheid state deal with issues of culpability and their own roles in South Africa's history of oppression.

On 4 July 1996, Mark Behr delivered the keynote address at a conference in Cape Town entitled “Faultlines—Inquiries around Truth and Reconciliation.” Speaking of his own novel, The Smell of Apples, Behr said, “as an act of creation The Smell of Apples represents, for me, the beginnings of a showdown with myself for my own support of a system like apartheid. [… I]f the book's publication has assisted white people in coming to terms with their own culpability for what is wrong in South Africa, then it has been worthwhile” (1).

This formulation reveals, perhaps unintentionally, the ambivalence of...