The Promise

The moment the metal box speaks her name, she knows it’s happened. She’s been in a tense, headachy mood all day, almost like she had a warning in a dream but can’t remember what it is. Some sign or image, just under the surface. Trouble down below. Fire underground.” 

By opening the novel with these sentences, Galgut foreshadows the “trouble down below” that will soon infect the Swart family. This trouble is also roiling throughout the entire country of South Africa. For the rest of the novel, this family’s shifting fortunes will be tied to the national story of cycles of violence and hope, unrest and progress. 

“They park in the driveway under the awning, with its beautiful green and purple and orange stripes. Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre.”

This description of the Swarts’ typically South African upper-middle-class home presents a noticeable contrast with Salome’s meager three-room shack. The Swarts’ reluctance to surrender even a small patch of property to Salome stands out as indefensible in light of their security. Once again, Galgut uses the Swart family dynamics to mirror the broader political situation in South Africa in the late 20th century.

“[Ockie] imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain. A brown-and-yellow countryside passes outside, dry except for where a river cuts through it, under a huge Highveld sky.” 

Ockie romanticizes South Africa’s colonial past. His dreams of an empty expanse, ignoring the reality that white South African colonizers did not encounter an empty land, but a land already populated. The tension between a view of South African history like Ockie’s and a view of South Africa like Lukas’s forms the core conflict undergirding the novel.