Rian Malan

Rian Malan is a South African journalist. My Traitor’s Heart, a book about himself, his family and his tribe, appeared from Bodley Head earlier this year.

Who’ll take Pretoria?

Rian Malan, 26 July 1990

Allister Sparks is one of South Africa’s best-known journalists, a former editor of the liberal Rand Daily Mail and Johannesburg correspondent of the Observer and Washington Post. As a young man, he spent a year in the United States, where he read The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash’s classic study of the Dixie state of mind. The book made a profound impression. Almost three decades later, Sparks set out to write a similar psycho-history of his own country.

Into Africa

J.D.F. Jones, 19 April 1990

Rian Malan’s Afrikaner roots stretch back almost as far as you can go, to a Huguenot arriving in Cape Town in 1688. The Malans have been at the heart of things ever since: at Slagtersnek in...

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