"Khayelitsha", by Steven Otter. Idiot.

Anyone who does not understand how self-hating white liberals think would do well to read this book. Borrow or steal it, though, as buying it would just encourage him.

Otter is from the Eastern Cape, and while living in Cape Town went to live in a black township for two years, not as a "social experiment" of course, but as a practical measure, as he needed a cheap place to live. His argument that writing a book about it was an afterthought seems a little weak, however, as he is a professional journalist...

Everything Otter says about his upbringing and about white society is negative. And almost everything he has to say about his new black brothers is positive. That sums up the entire book. But, just to expand, it must be added that the author mentions nothing about the horrific crime levels in the township; In fact he spent most of his time there drinking in shebeens, so how he managed to write about his experiences is beyond me.

I, however, learnt a great deal from this daft and pointless memoir. I learnt about a new kind of South African, one I had not had the misfortune to encounter until I read the book. I had no idea that someone could hate their own culture so much that life in a township could seem noble to him. The book is written with foreign audiences in mind, and as such has done very little for South Africa, except to allow this self-obsessed idiot to project himself as some kind of embassador of enlightenment.

The only words of criticism the author can bear to bestow upon his newfound friends is when a black drug dealer brags to him about all the addicted white girls he has f*cked - and even then he laments how his criticisms stem only from his own ingrained "racism". His highly idealised romance with a black girl, Vuyo, crashed to the ground after he finds out she has got pregnant by somebody else. Otter presents himself as someone who wants to experience life from "the other side", but in the end he simply denies what he is, and that for me is the height of self-hatred. Why are liberals, who will criticise their own people at the drop of a hat, so reluctant to apply the same standards to others?