Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  I thought to myself: I don’t believe in this monster. Those white men had reasons of their own to keep the Xhosas out of their own forest.

  And thus a book was born.

  I knew who Piet Barol was, and had written a book about his youth in Holland called History of a Pleasure Seeker. I knew when he first came to me how he would die. But as a white South African, I wasn’t able to tell the story of his relationship with a Xhosa village. Apartheid kept our rainbow nation’s many cultures apart very effectively. I knew that if I were to tell this story, I would need to go in quest of lived experience.

  I decided against visiting the Eastern Cape as a passive observer. I felt that any black family would feel obliged to behave graciously in the presence of a guest. In a forest in the Tunga Valley, I made a pact with two Xhosa friends—Onwaba Nkayi and Nelly Tom: to make a contribution.

  With them, the Community of Mthwaku, and a team of others, I helped found Project Lulutho—a centre of green business skills. I recruited an intrepid band of Xhosas, Zulus, French, Americans, English, Germans, and white South Africans. We lived under canvas for a year, and turned a desolate hillside into a forest of a thousand trees.

  We also installed a large solar-powered water extraction facility, which is keeping people and animals alive during the worst drought in a generation. Whenever I get a bad review, I remember this and cheer up.

  The experience of creating Lulutho was fabulous and appalling and hilarious and miserable, in approximately equal measure. I met Cebisa Zono, a young man who had written his own first novel in isiXhosa by the age of twenty-one—which I had done, in English, when I wrote The Drowning People at that age. A year before our arrival in the Eastern Cape, Cebisa’s ancestors appeared to him in a dream and told him that a group of mlungus would set up camp on the opposite side of the valley, and that when we arrived he should join us. He became my collaborator. I told him the story I was making, and he told me what a Xhosa might be thinking when certain things occurred.

  I am a great believer in the power of fiction to tell the truth. The fact that this book exists is thanks to many people—far too many to name here. My gratitude to them is profound and lifelong. They include: Nonkazimlo Tom; Onwaba Nkayi; Cebisa Zono; Benjamin Morse; Jane and Tony Mason; Lunga Dyantyi; Litha Dyantyi; Tim and Anne Wigley; Wendy Sanderson-Smith; Sibusiso Mntambo; Natasha “Flash” Dyer; Jens Bayer; Anna Henkel; Nathalie Gros; Gary Grabli; Jean-Francois Soleri; Rachel Docherty; Chief Morris Mkhatshane and the entire village of Tunga, who welcomed me so warmly, especially Nosakhe and Albertina, Mntukanti, Zibonele, Zimasile, Thembinkosi, Busisa, Bayanda, Nkosiyabo, Lubabalo, and Landu. Thanks also to Kathleen Anderson, my “necessary angel,” and Patrick Walsh; and to Kirsty Dunseath and Victoria Wilson—two of the best editors a man could hope for.

  Two extraordinary books by Xhosa writers deserve mention too: Native Life in South Africa, by Sol Plaatje, and Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs and Religious Beliefs by Vusamazulu Mutwa. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

  To learn about the strange things that happened while I wrote this book, search Who Killed Piet Barol? on YouTube.com.

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