Rian Malan

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Rian Malan (* 1954 in Blairgowrie / Johannesburg ) is a South African journalist and author.

Life

The ancestors of Rian Malan were among the first European settlers in what is now South Africa. Jacques Malan came to what was then the Dutch Cape Colony as a Huguenot refugee in 1688 . He is a great-nephew of the co-founder of the National Party , Daniel François Malan , and is related to former South African Defense Minister General Magnus Malan .

His father studied at the University of Stellenbosch and in the late 1930s was a member of the Ossewabrandwag there, which agitated against South Africa's participation in the British operation in World War II, but left the organization when there were attacks on police stations. He later worked as a math teacher in Queenstown and as a human resources manager for an oil company.

Rian Malan grew up in Linden, a suburb of Johannesburg , which he describes in retrospect as a " glass-bottom boat " floating on a "violent and mysterious ocean". He initially worked in South Africa as a journalist for The Star , mainly as a crime and court reporter. In 1976 he emigrated to the USA under the impression of increasing violence and race unrest . In 1985 he returned to South Africa, which is now largely in a state of emergency .

Malan dealt with his origins, exile and return and the state of South Africa in the years before the end of apartheid in his partly autobiographical book My traitor's heart , which appeared in 1990.

Controversy

Although the book was an international success and has been translated into several languages, Malan subsequently developed into a persona non grata in South Africa , as he, among other things, the involvement of Nelson Mandela's wife , Winnie Mandela , in several unsolved murders and his close friendship with Muammar al-Gaddafi publicly discussed. He described the African National Congress as "a kind of Stalinist party ". He also criticized exaggerated UN statistics on the spread of AIDS in South Africa, as malaria and tuberculosis claimed far more victims among the African population. Although he sees AIDS as a serious problem in South Africa, the infection rate is much lower than predicted. This actually good news would be suppressed in order not to endanger the donation volume. In 2007, the UN drastically corrected the forecast infection rates downwards, which seems to confirm Malan's theses. His reports on this topic were published in 2009 in the anthology "Resident Alien".

Campaign for Mbube

Malan also campaigned for the rights of Solomon Linda , the composer of Mbube , which became a millionaire worldwide as Wimoweh by Pete Seeger (November 1951) and finally as The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens (October 1961) . Linda had sold his rights to the song in August 1939 to his music producer Eric Gallo. Malan wrote an article about the song history in the US music magazine Rolling Stone in May 2000 and got the ball rolling. As a result, the South African lawyer Hanro Friedrich and Owen Dean took over the representation of Linda's three daughters in the copyright dispute in 2001. In 2003, the lawyers discovered that a clause in the South African Imperial Copyright Act of 1911 allowed rights to be returned 25 years after the author's death on his heir; that would have been 1987. In September 2004 a South African court ruled to this effect. After years of campaigns, it was achieved that the Lindas family received a share of all future income that will be generated with the song. This story is a core element of Malan's book The Lion Sleeps Tonight , which appeared in 2013.

Books

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rian Malan: My traitor's heart: A South African exile returns to face his country, his tribe, and his conscience . A Morgan Entrekin Book / The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990, p. 47
  2. ^ Books of The Times: The Harsh Judgments of a White South African . The New York Times, January 19, 1990.
  3. ^ The dark heart of the new South Africa . The Observer, March 25, 2007
  4. ↑ Kevin Bloom: REVIEW: Return of Rian Malan, the Aids bore ( Memento of February 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ). Daily Maverick , December 23, 2009
  5. ↑ Justin Cartwrtight: A Page in the Life: Rian Malan . The Telegraph, February 7, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Malan, Rian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Blairgowrie ( Johannesburg )