The Magistrate of Gower

The Magistrate of Gower

By Claire Robertson

Umuzi. R198

The Magistrate of Gower opens in 1902, in a Boer prisoner-of-war camp in Ceylon. A 17-year-old Henry Vos is incarcerated there with his commando, a handsome boy, so close to the Aryan ideal of his tribe that he stars, slightly bewildered, in the propaganda films and magazine articles of the day. He falls in love with a Cingalese youth, a monk, and when they are discovered he is sent, disgraced, to another prison. Henry will survive this, and return home to train as a lawyer. He is a wise, private man who embarks on an ascetic life as the magistrate of a small platteland town. It is a respectable town, with good women doing good works for the poor whites of the shanty town, people who fume in their poverty under the patronising kindness of the burgers. Henry works on an early statute that will one day become the Immorality Act; and the term 'quota', meaning jobs reserved for Afrikaners, begins to crop up, the first signs of social engineering that will sweep the Nats to power in 1948. Every page gleams with Robertson’s acute power of description. Her story might be set nearly a century ago, but it has much to say to modern-day South Africa, in the perfidy of well-intentioned charity and the iniquity of 'othering', but mostly in the threat of nationalism, which in her view takes the good in a people and twists it. In just her second outing, Claire Robertson takes her place with the established South African greats. She has the crispness and economy of Coetzee, the subtle, oblique depth of Vladislavić, the storytelling spell of Galgut and Mda. She is technically faultless and intensely imaginative. But she has something more, an affecting, profound humanity that is entirely her own.