‘Blood, sex, music, disease, miracles, murder, poverty, race, profit, beauty. These are the narratives of post-apartheid South Africa that hang on Manny’s walls. They are bewildering and illogical, impossible and bizarre, and still they cohere—because whatever the country is, it is not London or Durham or the East Village on a humid evening in June.’
A story at once deeply personal and edifyingly public, Ways of Staying is one man’s journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined. From the murder of the author’s cousin in 2006 to the hills of Zululand mere weeks after the death of historian David Rattray, from the fateful ruling party showdown at Polokwane in 2007 to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, here is a book that ventures far beneath the headlines and into the very marrow of a strange and troubled land.
And yet it is in these dark places where few care to look that Kevin Bloom meets men and women who believe that South Africa’s history can be overcome, men and women who are engaged in the act of imagining some kinder future.
At times brutal and raw, at times tender and compassionate, Ways of Staying is in the final analysis a love song to a country that will not be forsaken.