Ruby Red

Ostensibly, Ruby Red is about a young white English-speaking South African girl, Ruby, falling in love with an Afrikaans boy in the apartheid era. We are treated to descriptions of Ruby’s golden lifestyle compared with township life, to hackneyed descriptions of apartheid which give the impression of repeated hearsay, lacking the feel of authenticity.

Characters, like Ruby’s perfect parents, are implausible. They are good-looking, intelligent, rich, compassionate beyond belief to poor starving artists, politically radical, yet still ‘appalled’ to learn that a township painter works in a shack. They are hostile to Afrikaners, even though they belong to a political opposition which included some Afrikaners.

Ruby is remarkably politically and emotionally mature. She has none of the usual teenage problems with her parents. Despite their politics leading to her isolation at home and at school, she supports them totally. She only wishes other people were as right-thinking as they are. She soon sorts out their problem with Afrikaners by telling them off. An undercover security policeman inexplicably warns Ruby of a forthcoming raid, which then turns into a damp squib because the hardened Gestapo-types are scared of the international media!

Ruby’s Afrikaner friends, the grandchildren of a broederbond member, attend an all-Afrikaans school, never engage with blacks save as servants, have nothing in their environment to teach them otherwise, yet hold remarkably progressive views on apartheid. They even challenge their backward father on this, despite being totally under his thumb. The boyfriend is inexplicably in the right place at the right time to be able to warn her parents of impending arrest.

As a South African political activist in the seventies and eighties, I find the book at best extremely paternalistic, at worst sometimes racist. Thus, for example, the ‘colour-blind’ Ruby, glibly repeats one of apartheid’s worst racist stereotypes, not dissimilar from the history books we rejected: ‘Cape Coloureds were looked down upon by blacks and whites… Being of mixed blood, they belonged to neither group. They were a lost people in many ways. They often drank too much and developed their own strange jargon…’

One wonders whether the SA Finance Minister, once classified ‘Cape Coloured’ would be as offended as I was. As much, I am sure, as Afrikaners at the paternalistic description of their: ‘rosy, rugged cheeks and upturned noses’? Glass’s terminology is questionable. Eg. ‘Riots’ is the way the state saw the events of 16 June 1976 ie rebellion against legitimate authority. Politically aware people talk about uprisings against oppression.

These are just a few examples of why I would definitely not recommend this book to any young reader, either as a good read or as something which gives a true feeling of what it was like living in the apartheid era.