It has been twenty-five years since this book first saw the light of day. A quarter of a century, that is. I wrote the first part in an apartment on Løkkeveien in Oslo. It was late autumn and cold. I could see the American embassy through the window of the drafty study. There were demonstrations going on outside the building all the time. I used to walk over there between my writing stints. You could still catch the occasional sharp remark from people passing in the street. But they were fewer and less hostile than before. It was already 1972. The Americans were losing their desperate war of aggression in Vietnam.
I remember that autumn clearly. The leaves turning yellow in the Palace Park, the marines outside the embassy gate always grim. But most of all I remember what I was thinking. It was a time of great joy, of great energy. Everything was still possible. Nothing was either lost or settled. Except that the Vietnamese were certain to win. Imperialism was beginning to show signs of strain. The course had already been set, along sufficiently deep and navigable channels. But there were, of course, also indications to the contrary: neither I nor any of my friends seriously believed that we would see South Africa’s apartheid system brought to an end in our lifetime. In retrospect, I can now recognize that we were both right and wrong, as is always the case when one tries to look into the future.
While I sat and wrote this book, I was thinking: with this one, for the first time, I would get into print. Until then I had managed to have bits and pieces published in the newspapers. And some of my plays had been performed. I had been directing in various theaters. That way I could afford to spend a month at a time only writing. Which was what it was all about. The purpose of my life. I could not imagine anything else. What could it otherwise be?
I had made up my mind to try to avoid ever having any of my work rejected. At least any longer texts. Novels, in other words. For that reason, the year before I had torn up a couple of manuscripts that I did not think were good enough. I never submitted them to a publisher. But when this book was eventually finished (the latter part was written in an equally drafty apartment on Trotzgatan in Falun, a small provincial town in the middle of Sweden), I dropped the manuscript into a mailbox. In June I received a postcard with a picture of Dan Andersson. Sune Stigsjöö was the head of Författarförlaget at the time. He told me that the book had been accepted and would be published.
It was well received. (As I recall, Björn Fremer’s in Kvällsposten was the only negative review.) As a result, I began to get grants. I could now dispense with some of my bread-and-butter activities.
That is now a quarter of a century ago. I wrote the manuscript on an unreliable old typewriter with Norwegian characters. Today I am composing these lines on a computer that weighs scarcely more than three kilos.
Certainly, much has happened in those twenty-five years. Some walls have come down, others have gone up. One empire has fallen, the other is being weakened from within; new centers of power are taking shape. But the poor and exploited have become even poorer during these years. And Sweden has gone from making an honest attempt at building a decent society to social depredation. An ever-clearer division between those who are needed and those who are expendable. Today there are ghettos outside Swedish cities. Twenty-five years ago they did not exist.
As I read through this book again after all these years, I realize that this quarter century has been but a short time in history. What I wrote here is still highly relevant.
I have made a number of small changes to the wording for this edition. But the story is the same. I have not touched it.
It was not necessary to do so.
Henning Mankell
Mozambique, November 1997