The Lion Sleeps Tonight

“Here, as in nothing I’ve read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa. . . . Triumphant.” —Salman Rushdie on My Traitor’s Heart

Since its original publication twenty years ago, Rian Malan’s classic work of narrative nonfiction, My Traitor’s Heart, has earned its author comparisons to masters of literary nonfiction like Michael Herr and Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski, and he has been called “South Africa’s Hunter S. Thompson” by London’s Times. In that book, Malan told the story of South Africa through his search into his family’s four-hundred-year history and his own tortuous attempts to come to terms with race and with the terrible ways black and white South Africans killed each other.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight is Malan’s remarkable chronicle of South Africa’s halting, sometimes violent, steps and missteps, taken as blacks and whites try to build a new country. The collection comprises twenty-one pieces; the title story investigates the provenance of the world famous song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which Malan traces back to a Zulu singer named Solomon Linda who recorded a song called “Mbube” in the 1930s, which went on to be cov­ered by Pete Seeger, REM, and Phish, and was incorporated into the musical The Lion King. In other essays, Malan follows the trial of Winnie Mandela; he writes about the last Afrikaner, an old Boer woman who, as a child, trekked north into Tanzania and settled on the slopes of Mount Meru; he plunges into the explosive controversy over President Mbeki’s AIDS policies of the 1990s; and finally he brings the book full circle with the story of fabulous Alcock brothers (sons of Neil and Creina whose heartbreaking story was told in My Traitor’s Heart), two young white South Africans raised among the Zulu and fluent in their language and customs. The stories, combined with Malan’s sar­donic interstitial commentary, offer a brilliantly observed portrait of contemporary South Africa.

PRAISE FOR RIAN MALAN AND THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT:

“[The Lion Sleeps Tonight], quite simply, is outstandingly good.” —DAILY MAVERICK (SOUTH AFRICA)

“Malan is a great storyteller and sometime polemicist . . . a consistently vivid, energetic writer. It’s hard not to keep reading [The Lion Sleeps Tonight] once you’ve started, and even when you’re done you’re likely to page back through the book in case there’s something you missed. The energy is in the prose, in the clash of slang and biblical phraseology, in his very South African voice; it’s also in his drive to tell a story, to turn his gimlet eye on something that troubles him and to subject it to the scratching of his lively melancholia.” —MAIL AND GUARDIAN (SOUTH AFRICA)

“Rian Malan is a master of landscape and a master of narrative, with a gift of living language that bubbles up from a full heart and an active mind.” —V. S. NAIPAUL

“Malan is, as I think most South Africans know, an absolutely remarkable writer—perhaps one of the best writers and commentators in the world.” —DAILY DISPATCH (SOUTH AFRICA)

“Malan could always see the story when others had long since lost the plot. Sometimes he went completely off his head as he drew out the fugitive detail, digging in dirt for a diamond, shaking up the grievously overlooked. He tried to escape the word. He went fishing for five years, trying to hide from the relentlessly pursuing plot, but to no avail. When it comes to writing, Malan is dangerously good and there is no getting away.” —LIN SAMPSON, SUNDAY TIMES (SOUTH AFRICA)