Harry Mac
South Africa is an exciting, dangerous place to live in the 1960s. Tom’s Dad is Harry Mac, a journalist using his pen to expose the truth about the Nationalist government coming into power by using propaganda and brutality, techniques often associated with the Nazis. The rebellion against this government is growing, but so are the restrictive rules and the disappearance of dissenters. Tom is carrying a huge secret, overheard in a conversation between his father and another journalist, one Tom is afraid to share with his best friend, Millie. Tom’s weakness as a polio victim increases with the growing tension in the country, his physical and mental suffering paralleling the powerlessness and fear of the different nationalities in South Africa: the Afrikaaners, Indians, Jews, British, and others. Nelson Mandela briefly invigorates the anti-apartheid movement, but imprisonment in mental institutions and jails, silencing, kidnapping, and death for the black population become the norm.
What is even more fascinating about this coming-of-age story becomes clear in the accounts of the insidious ways dictators gradually alter the acceptable news and the doctrine spread through political talks, radio, newspapers and pamphlets. Yes, protest is alive and well but obviously ineffective. Sol, Millie’s Dad, a survivor of the Holocaust, reads the work of Primo Levi to Tom to understand the nature of human responses to the Nazis then and now. Harry Mac hunts to maintain a sense of power and to release tension but his “anger smells like a rhino” to his son, a noxious odor spreading every day. Amazingly, he is never arrested! Tom’s narration takes us through the steps we know will lead to the inevitable explosion. Vibrant, poignant historical fiction.
