What an unexpected great read. This had been sitting on my shelves for a long time and it kept getting put aside for other reads so I finally just started over and read it all in about 2 sittings and it was powerful. A story of the very starting of apartheid South Africa and it is brutally honest and without excuses. A good read to go with my reading last fall of Cry, the Beloved Country.

Harry Bloom seems to have been an extraordinary character: he grew up in South Africa and qualified as a lawyer there; he and his wife worked as war correspondents in Europe during WWII; they lived in Czechoslovakia for a while, then moved back to South Africa, where he worked with Bram Fischer and Nelson Mandela in the anti-apartheid campaign, wrote a couple of novels, and collaborated with Todd Matshikiza on the hit jazz musical King Kong (which launched Miriam Makeba's international career). It's not recorded what he did on his days off!
After a spell in jail he left South Africa in 1962 and started an unexpected new career as an academic lawyer at the University of Kent, becoming a pioneer of the then still rather esoteric field of computer and media law.

This book, originally published in 1956 as Episode and later variously as Transvaal Episode or Episode in Transvaal, was the first of Bloom's two novels. Set in a fictitious small town, it's an anatomical dissection of a township riot, the sort of incident that fills newspaper columns for a couple of days but is then forgotten about by everyone except those whose family members ended up dead or in jail. It often feels as if it is veering off into satire, but Bloom's sober, journalistic style keeps reminding us that it's actually a composite picture of real events in real places.

The arrival of new-broom administrator Hendrik Du Toit to run the "native location" at Nelstroom marks a significant downturn for the twelve thousand black people who live there: the conscientious but unimaginative Du Toit is determined to stamp out the routine petty corruption that allows them to work around the impossible requirements of the pass laws and other apartheid regulations. When the idle, billiard-playing police commander is also replaced by a keen young lieutenant fresh from Riot Control school, the local branch of the ANC asks for assistance, and the experienced organiser Mabaso is assigned to them.

A trivial dispute about a missing collar in a bag of laundry sparks off a chain of events that escalate, thanks to the malice of Lieutenant Swanepoel and the incompetence of Du Toit, into a full-scale riot, with the police completely out of control, driving through the location shooting at random, and the location residents, boxed in with nowhere else to go, expressing their rage by burning down their own public amenities and attacking community leaders. Mabaso does his best to restrain things and puts his faith in the humiliation the authorities are going to face when their actions are exposed in court, but Swanepoel's special training hasn't been wasted: he makes sure that Mabaso, at least, is shot "attempting to escape" from police custody.

A searing attack on the poisonous working of institutionalised racism, obviously informed by Bloom's experience of Europe in the aftermath of the war as well as by what he's seen in South Africa, although he's careful to avoid making explicit comparisons between Afrikaners and Nazis. Over and over again he gives his characters opportunities to avoid the catastrophe, but they fail, because they would require a white official actually to listen to what a black person is telling him rather than fit it into his library of possible black-white interactions ("Yes, baas", "Right away, baas", etc.). ( )

This novel tells the tale of a South Africa town during Apartheid and how the blacks begin their rebellion against a somnolent white society. It’s pretty well written, plus it’s a story of which I had no prior knowledge, so I enjoyed learning about the times. ( )