First published in Afrikaans as "Als Is Nie Net Swart En Wit Nie, this expanded memoir probes some of the most pivotal issues facing South Africa today: race, ‘othering’, unremembering, identity, gangsterism, addiction, and the process of making meaning of a society that has become unhinged from its moorings.
Malvory Adams is an author and veteran journalist who served as an editorial executive at mainstream newspapers such as City Press, Sowetan, Die Burger, Beeld and Son. At present, he plies his trade as a News Bulletin Writer at Afrikaanse TV-Nuus on SABC2. Away from the newsroom, he is the singer-songwriter MeZZo.
He walks with the reader through a lion-hearted personal lens and through the purgatory of his travelogue, which starts 15 years before his birth in the tiny Eastern Cape hamlet of Breidbach. He dramatically recounts how his German grandfather robbed him of his grandparents. Premised on that epoch-making deed, he takes the reader on a painful journey of uprooting, an agonising coming of age, and the intricacies of navigating cultural belongings and a bloodline concoction. Next, he plummets horrifyingly into a netherworld of alcoholism culminating in a spine-chilling desperate act.
On this treacherous odyssey to restoration and redemption, the veils of darkness lift, and he now lives in a world that is not stark black and white but where the grey mitigates the storms.
