In Apartheid – South African Memories, Dr. Norman Nathan stitches together the fabric of a life
lived between two worlds—the sunbaked, segregated streets of Johannesburg and the sterile
corridors of American hospitals where he later healed bodies and minds.
However, this is not your typical memoir. Innocence and cruelty, love and sorrow, and the silent
tenacity of common people trapped in the whirlpool of a totalitarian government are all
interwoven into this intensely intimate tapestry. Nathan, a doctor by profession and a born
storyteller, transports readers to the untamed interior of Africa, where the roar of lions reflected
the turmoil of a nation, and to his childhood home in Greenside, where the aroma of jacaranda
blooms blended with the metallic tang of terror.
The vibrant colors of nostalgia are used to depict Nathan’s early years in 1950s Johannesburg,
including bike journeys to see Westerns at the Rex theater, the excitement of free soft-serve ice
cream, and the earthy scent of pap en vleis prepared by Franz, the family’s Venda cook.
However, these picturesque vistas are broken up by terrifying violent moments. Young Norman
sees two Afrikaner police officers beat a Zulu man for not having a passbook one afternoon; the
bloody truncheon is a hideous contrast to the peacefulness of the suburbs.
Recounted with unwavering clarity, the incident becomes a microcosm of the cruelty of
apartheid: the casual dehumanization, the involvement of spectators, and the way brutality was
woven into the everyday like a nightmare that appears during the day.
The memoir’s power lies in its intimacy. Nathan doesn’t just describe apartheid—he makes us
feel it through the lives of those who lived under its shadow:
Interspersed with childhood vignettes are lyrical odysseys into Africa’s untamed landscapes.
Nathan’s father, an amateur filmmaker, immortalized their trips to Kruger National Park in
grainy 16mm reels: elephants bathing at waterholes, a kudu bull vaulting over their Hudson’s
hood, and the haunting spectacle of lions feasting on a hippo carcass in Gorongoza.
These passages pulse with awe, but Nathan juxtaposes them with tragedy.
Gorongoza, once an Eden of biodiversity, is later ravaged by civil war—its animals slaughtered,
its rivers mined, its beauty sacrificed to Cold War geopolitics. The loss is visceral, a metaphor
for how violence consumes even the purest corners of the world.
The political seeps into the personal. As a conscript in the Transvaal Scottish Regiment, Nathan
endures the hypocrisy of training to “fight communism” while his platoon mates terrorize Black
civilians for sport.
His defiance—arguing for Helen Suzman’s vision of gradual enfranchisement—earns him the
slur kaffirboetie (“kaffir brother”) and midnight raids by the Special Branch. Yet even here,
humanity flickers:
Nathan’s medical career becomes an act of quiet rebellion. At Charles Johnson Memorial
Hospital in Zululand, he extracts teeth, delivers breech babies, and learns from sangomas—all
under the watchful eye of apartheid spies.
The hospital, a rare integrated space, is a beacon of what South Africa could be. But the regime’s
claws are never far:
The memoir’s most harrowing scenes unfold in Alexandra Township’s clinic, where Nathan and
Jay, his Indian classmate, treat patients in a crumbling building with no supervising doctor.
A young woman dies of asthma in his arms, her veins collapsed beyond reach of a needle; a man
bleeds silently with a screwdriver buried in his back, waiting hours for an ambulance that never
comes.
These are not clinical case studies but raw, aching failures of a system designed to let Black
bodies suffer.
The book closes with Nathan’s 1970 graduation and flight to America, where he would spend
decades treating coal miners and cystic fibrosis patients—a world away from the veld.
Yet his prose lingers in the past, haunted by the question: Could I have done more? There’s no
grand redemption arc, only the quiet acknowledgment that survival, too, is a form of resistance.