"I wanted very much to raise awareness of this hidden history and also of the ongoing act of hiding it" - Damian Barr

Credit © Daisy Honeybunn.Honeybunn Photography

 

Is the existence of these concentration camps widely known in Britain and/or taught at school?

No, this is not history that is part of our curriculum—we are taught more about the Tudors or WWI and WWII than we are about this war.  Given how the Boer Wars changed the nature of warfare -with the introduction of the concentration camps, for example – remarkably little is taught about it in our schools.

Empire is taken as a natural fact - it is insufficiently reckoned with.  I think we look at the world wars because there we were ‘the good guys’. Britain was rightly vilified in the European press at the time of the Boer Wars—including in France. 

Now we remember this conflict almost fondly, as a Victorian adventure, many writers in the #BLM movement are doing work they shouldn’t have to in order to challenge the stories that get told around history. I look forward to Empire Land by Sathnam Sanghera.

Did intertwining Raymond’s and Sarah’s stories seem obvious to you from the beginning?

Yes – how many of our choices in the present are influenced by the past? I was drawn to the idea that we might be more influenced than we know by the people and events that have gone before us. I am interested in this idea-can we escape the past without knowing what the past was?  Can events in the present do something to ‘save’ the past?

How do the British generally relate to South Africa, compared to the former colonies of the Empire like India or Australia?

I don’t feel I can answer this question on behalf of ‘the British’ because we are as diverse as all the other nations you describe.

What I will say is, growing up in 1980s we took part in anti-Apartheid actions at school so I was very aware of what was happening there and then and that stayed with me—those pictures of massacres and riots and the sense of injustice. I felt the need to explore it and understand it insofar as I can given who I am.

By “bringing a forgotten history to life”, do you think you, as a writer from Scotland, have made the subject of the camps a bit less taboo and paved the way for other authors, South African preferably, to write about it?

I wanted very much to raise awareness of this hidden history and also of the ongoing act of hiding it. Jacob Rees-Mogg lied about the camps on BBC ‘Question Time’ as recently as 2019.

The story of the camps is a part of the plot in Years & Years by Russell T Davies. There is great literature about this in South Africa, KampHoer for example.

I think there are so many stories till be told, so many voices still to be heard.

 
Have you been apprehensive about tackling such a broad subject?

Yes.  I knew so little and had to learn so much and also learn when to stop researching.

I took 7 years to write this book and at times I was haunted by it night and day—it did give me nightmares.

I felt a great sense of responsibility and still do.  To make the history and the story of now come to life I had to find my characters and get to know them—that was the key.

Your funny and moving memoir, Maggie & me, is a very personal book which exposes yourself widely to the world. Did you find it easier to write You will be safe here?

Thank you.  I found they both demanded a sense of responsibility to others—real, imagined, living and dead.  I thought fiction would be freeing but you’re never from a moral framework, or shouldn’t be. There is as much of me in the novel as there is in the memoir, you just need to know where to look. One is the key to the other, maybe.

 
Am I right to assume you have Raymond's mother read the novel?

Yes, she very generously spent time with me on email before and after the research and writing. And I spent some days with her in South Africa.  She is a brave person who feels guilty about the death of her son Raymond Buys at the hands of the boys and men who ran that camp. This story says a lot about that.

Did she tell you what she thought of it?

She was happy for me to co-dedicate the book to her son Raymond.

My character Willem is not Raymond but Willem’s experiences in the camp he is sent to in the novel were partly sparked by the terror Raymond Buys faced in real life.  These camps, which promise to ‘make men out of boys’ still exist in South Africa and in other countries. They perpetuate a toxic masculinity that seeks to crush any young man who is different in any way.

Wilna Buys was satisfied that this book might make other parents aware of what she did not know and so perhaps stop them sending their sons to similar places and in doing so maybe save lives.

Has the promotion of the novel allowed you to reunite with your childhood friend yet?

Raymond Buys reminded me of a friend I had made and lost in childhood—when I saw the story of Raymond I thought I was looking at my friend. I was not but this gave me an emotional connection to Raymond which has grown and deepened since.

I have not year from that friend and maybe I never will, who knows.

 

  Damian Barr - Tout ira bien
(Cherche Midi, 2020)
Traduction de l'anglais (Royaume-Uni) : Caroline Nicolas
Damian Barr - You will be safe here
(Bloomsbury, 2019)