Bitter Fruit

Bitter Fruit is a novel by Achmat Dangor first published in 2001 by Kwela Books of Cape Town. Set in South Africa in 1998, it is about the disintegration of a Coloured family in the years after the end of apartheid. According to Gabriel Gbadamosi's review in The Guardian, "All the bases are touched in a reckoning with South Africa's past and present turmoil, and no box left unopened in the search for some kind of limbo or twilight zone where all unresolved conflicts might find resolution." Plot summary Silas Ali is a Johannesburg lawyer approaching 50 who has risen to prominence during Nelson Mandela's presidency. A high-ranking civil servant occasionally even seen on television next to Mandela, he is employed as a liaison officer assigned to coordinate governmental activities with those of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. While his attractive wife Lydia works as a nurse, their only child, 18-year-old Michael reads Literature at Wits University. The past catches up with Silas Ali one Sunday morning at a shopping mall when he sees, and recognizes, François du Boise, an Afrikaner policeman who, in 1978, raped Lydia somewhere in the veld while Silas was made to listen to her screams from inside a police van—an act of brutality obviously triggered by Silas's involvement with the MK. For almost twenty years, Silas and Lydia have kept quiet about the crime, both to each other and towards the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Lydia has never shared her terrible suspicion that du Boise is Michael's natural father with anyone other than her secret diary. Trapped in an unpromising, sexless marriage, and more than ten years younger than her husband, Lydia copes badly with Silas's sudden revelation about du Boise and the additional information that the now retired policeman has applied for amnesty for a number of sexual assaults, including the one on her. In an act of self-injury, she dances on broken glass and has to be hospitalised under the pretence of having suffered a freak accident.