[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies.]
Dennis Walder, distinguished scholar of Victorian and postcolonial literature and a pillar of the Open University, tells his own story and that of his complicated family in this beautifully written memoir.
In Part 1 he tells of his childhood and adolescence in South Africa, his father, a Swiss-German hotelier, his stepfather, a British-born journalist and his mother, Ruth, a German from South West Africa (Namibia). He relates childhood memories, first sexual experiences and observations of the political and social environment, including his reactions to the Wind of Change speech and the Sharpeville Massacre. Voluntary work in the townships and his first visit to Europe lead to questioning and unease. He makes a false start as a student of chemical engineering at the University of Cape Town before discovering his real call to English Literature. He has some involvement in Progressive, Liberal and student politics though never in violent activism. Holder of a South African passport, he is able to leave for Europe before being called up for military service.
Of this decision he writes,
I am leaving, not going anywhere, the sum of my commitment, and my freedom. My motives are not heroic, not will I pretend they are. What I know is staying means being forever in debt to the repression of others. Nor am I prepared to go underground, supposing that were possible now without arrest. (p. 110)
Part 2 follows Walder through studies, research (a PhD on Charles Dickens) and teaching at Edinburgh, meeting Athol Fugard, a job at the Open University, a brief doomed marriage to his South African girlfriend, and a happy, long-lasting second marriage to his Scottish wife, Mary. He dabbles uneasily with Communism, student protest and anti-Apartheid activism.
In 1981 he visits South Africa to undertake research for a book on Fugard and see his family. He spends time in Johannesburg, Soweto and Cape Town: ‘This country is worse than anything I remembered or thought I knew’, he records (p. 189). ‘The question is, how far is one compromised, not whether it is possible or impossible to compromise’ (p. 195). There are some awkward/embarrassing conversations and encounters with old and new friends. including those who consider themselves liberal but whose attitude to, for example, their black servants seems shocking to Walder and to Mary (p. 201).
Part 3 is entitled ‘The persistence of the past’. Walder’s family life is happy, his professional life successful. He follows events in Southern Africa, where nobody white admits they supported Apartheid (p. 237), and those in the wider world. And increasingly he is puzzled by the silences and inconsistencies in his mother’s account of her relationships and family history and how little he knows of her antecedents. He takes his children to South Africa and begins researching Ruth’s Namibian roots, ‘Unsure of what drives me. I have been in a kind of daze or dream, blissfully unaware of reality, even avoiding finding things out, yet increasingly impelled to continue’ (p. 255). His grandfather Albert Liebenstein was a German trader and businessman. Was he implicated in Namibian genocide? This is a troubling thought.
He uncovers traces of Ruth Liebenstein’s parents in the Namibian National Archives, Albert and Margrethe coming from Germany to marry when white women were at a premium. Details of Ruth as a young woman emerge: ‘fragments, falling through the twilight of history’ (p. 267).
In Part 4, ‘Through a glass darkly’, the family story is unravelled through research in archives in Windhoek, South Africa and in Germany. Internet research uncovers a network of Liebensteins (now Livingstons) in America who know something of Albert and a brother’s life in Africa. Albert was not, as Ruth – estranged from her father – had claimed, an only child. He had 10 siblings and they were Jewish, although Ruth and her mother were baptised Lutherans. Walder gets to know his American cousins and more of the family history. Ruth’s uncle Bernhard had served under General Lettow von Vorbeck during the First World War. Family members perished in the Holocaust in the Second World War. Walder visits the original family home, Bad Liebenstein. He also visits nearby Buchenwald and Auschwitz.
Is complicity, like knowledge, always partial? (p. 326)
Many threads and themes can be traced through this volume. You can read the first third as a coming-of-age memoir. You can read about the lived experience of growing up white in Apartheid South Africa. You can revisit the role of exiled South African academics in British academia. You can meet giants of Commonwealth literature, notably Athol Fugard, and gain insights into how the study of Commonwealth and postcolonial literature became mainstream in English and Scottish universities. You can read it like a ‘Who do you think you are?’ investigation into family history.
Terry Barringer is the Book Review Editor of The Round Table Journal.
Amid the alien corn: a son’s memoir by Dennis Walder, Market Harborough, Troubador Publishing, 2025.
