Trencherman by Eben Venter review – South Africa after nuclear meltdown

The white population has fled, government has all but vanished … First published in Afrikaans a decade ago, this post-apocalyptic successor to Heart of Darkness excavates the traumas of a nation

Trencherman, first published a decade ago in Afrikaans and now available for the first time in Britain, imagines a post-apocalyptic South Africa plunged into crisis by the explosion of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station and the almost total emigration of the country’s white population. Overtly writing back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Eben Venter depicts the once hopeful Rainbow Nation transformed into a feudal society run by criminal syndicates and blighted by child trafficking. Police are corrupt and central government has all but vanished.

The novel’s narrator, Martin Jasper Louw, known as Marlouw, is – like Venter – an Afrikaner expat in Australia. His sister, Heleen, pleads with him to return to the family’s former Eastern Cape farm, Ouplaas (Old Farm), where her adult son, Koert, now lives. After their parents’ death, Marlouw had convinced Heleen that she should sign the farm over to the families who worked the land as compensation for generations of inequality.

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