Novels | Wessel Ebersohn

The Classifier

In The Classifier, the reader journeys into the love of two young people who will not recognise the odds against them. On one level, this is the story of a young Afrikaner growing up, living a life full of the young-manly pursuits of which his community approves, until he finds love where the scriptures of his people forbid it. On another, it is the tragedy of the white man in Africa, applying the strictest racial restrictions on all who fall outside his group and ultimately faced with the knowledge that he may have outstayed his welcome.

The teenage love affair of Chris and Ruthie takes place against the turbulent political backdrop of South Africa in the 1970s. He comes from the white suburb of Red Hill and she from coloured Greenwood Park on the other side of the valley.

They try to ignore the realities that surround them, but that his father is the head of the province’s Race Classification office is a fact that cannot be wished away. Both families are threatened. The precarious trans-racial house of cards of which Ruthie’s family consists will crumble at the smallest conflict with authority.

The unwavering, insecure leadership Chris’s father provides his family is revealed to be equally vulnerable. And it is Chris’s father from which the threat to the young people must come. He has made race classification his life work and sees it as the core of his people’s survival.

Ruthie is a barely pubescent young woman, a child in a female-headed household. She has grown up knowing that politics is not for her. Ma Peterson, her mother, has explained to her children many times that catastrophe can result in their drawing the slightest attention of the authorities to themselves. ‘We are building a life,’ she tells her children. ‘We can’t afford to do politics.’

Ruthie will introduce Chris to music he will grow to love. She will extract from him levels of emotion that he did know could exist and plunge with him into a despair neither could have anticipated. Together they travel towards a destiny that has elements of both catastrophe and triumph.

While The Classifier is essentially a love story, it does take readers inside the race classification machinery at the time that the pressures on the apartheid system are building, both inside the country and internationally. The inner workings of apartheid’s very core and the fears that brought it into being are laid bare.

The carefree, idyllic aspects of Chris and Ruthie’s courtship, the thrill Chris experiences while hunting with his father and his wonderful friendship with his cousin, Abraham: all play out to a stunning climax. Ultimately the adult Chris is seen remembering the past and trying to cope with its effect on his life.

The years in which the story takes place are those between the 1974 revolution in Mozambique and South Africa’s 1976 schools rebellion. Both have a deep impact on Chris’s family and on himself personally. In the first of these events he witnesses the processing of the Portuguese refugees from Mozambique, as they are divided into those white enough to be allowed to stay and those too dark, who have to be sent on the Brazil. Eventually, it is time spent in his father’s office that brings Chris face to face with the truth he had never fully understood.

Chris’s view of the sorting through of the Portuguese is not a broad altruistic one though. As far as he, with his boyish world view is concerned, the Portuguese dishonoured their country when they fled Mozambique and they did not deserve better. But then there is Ruthie, and where would she have been placed in the orgy of race classification that accompanied the flood of Portuguese refugees? he asks himself. And where is she placed now?

The Classifier is both an uncompromising telling of a tragedy typical of the time and the story of a love that would change the lives of everyone it touched.

Publishers:

Umuzi

Publish date: June 2011

Details: In Print

ISBN: 978 1 415201510

In Touching Distance

Book description:

The Ebersohn family moved to the knysna forest to escape the city life. There they started a wildlife care centre to help some baby birds. Little did they know what an adventure the care centre would turn out to be.

Follow the story of the family as they came in touching distance of the wild creatures they cared for.

Publishers:

Paper Movie Publishers

Publishing date: 2004

Details: Out of print

ISBN: 0958479615

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Klara’s visitors

Book description:

A private journals kept by Adolf Hitler reveals him as a figure of farce. Wessel Ebersohn imagines these diaries, and shows Hitler’s arrogant blustering and self deception from boyhood through the First World War and the rise of the Nazi Party during the twenties and the thirties.

The tone is bitingly satirical. Even as a small child, Hitler has his screaming rages. In his game he is Bismarck, killing Frenchmen; or the Pope, being infallible. At school he sells his pornographic drawings to the teachers, and then blackmails them for better marks. He works on his voice (he aims at a rich basso) and his handshake (which must reveal the iron of his will). He has great plans for his moustache (“the biggest and broadest in Germany”). He discovers astrology. He experiences abject poverty. In the war he rises only to the rank of corporal. His Lieutenant tell him he lacks the qualities of a leader: “I can scarcely believe my ears; I, who have earned the Iron Cross, 2^nd class.”

Then in 1919 he takes over the Workers’ party, which has a membership of nine, and is on his way. Among the early recruitsis Rohm, “not afraid to crack a few skulls”, and Goebbels, who “envies my clear blue eyes”. The Swastika as symbol, the founding of the storm troopers, the writing of Mein Kampf, each step in the party’s development ia someone else’s idea, initially pooh-poohed by Hitler, but quickly claimed as his own. The suspicion of a Jewish grandfather is instantly suppressed. But his anguished sense of sexual inadequacy is more difficult to ignore . . . It’s all a farce that illuminates, in an extraordinarily effective way, the monstrous tragedy that was Nazism.

Publishers:

Victor Gollancz Ltd, UK

Publishing date: 1988

Details: Out of print

ISBN: 978 0575039469

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The Otter and Mr Ogilvie

Book description:

An otter lived in a place called Leafy Glen. One day a horrible man named Mister Ogilvie tears down Leafy glen and forces the otter to leave the only home she has ever known. Follow her trials to try and find a new home.

This book was written as a labour of love for his two granddaughters and has found a place in the hearts of many young people since then.

Publishers:

Hodder and Stoughton, SA

Publishing date: 1987

Details: Out of print

ISBN: 0947054030

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Store up the Anger

Book description:

This is a painful account of the death of Sam Bhengu, a young black in South Africa – and a powerful, eloquent testimony to the man’s struggle against anonymity and defeat.

Lying in a prison cell, Sam’s injured brain flashes his life before him in a series of violent, sad and lyrical episodes. And, as the past begins to gain on the present, the reader finds his own stored anger vented on this terrible betrayal of our humanity.