Ways of Staying: Interview and Podcast with Kevin Bloom

by Ben - Editor on Apr 20th, 2009

In 2007, Kevin Bloom was described as “a committed (if sometimes nervous) observer of the South African experience”. His new book, Ways of Staying is the fruit of that commitment, a story at once deeply personal and edifyingly public, a journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined.

Comparisons with Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart have been forthcoming, but perhaps not entirely apt, because the context is different: if anything, the relationship that South African whites have with their country has gotten more complex since 1994. Ways of Staying inhabits the gray areas of South Africa’s “second transition”. It turns answers into questions; it also helps us imagine a kinder future.

Here are two features on the author put together by Tymon Smith, a podcast and an in-depth interview:

Podcast: Keven Bloom speaks to Tymon Smith
Note: the sound quality is spotty – turn the speakers up a bit

Not playing? Listen at Multimedia @ TheTimes

Interview

“If you’re in your mid-30s like me, you’ve seen Mandela released, you watched the Rubicon speech when you were 10 years old, you saw — when you were getting out of your swimming pool and towelling your back in the northern suburbs — a thin plume of smoke rising in the southwest and you wondered what that was,” says Kevin Bloom. We’re sitting at a bakery in Rosebank talking about Bloom’s first book, Ways of Staying, a non-fiction narrative.

He continues, “We’ve seen the Mbeki years. We’ve seen crime move out of the townships and into the northern suburbs. Why? Because we no longer have a police force whose sole reason for existence was to protect a privileged minority, so crime spread,” a point that has been made by others, but fair enough, Bloom is as entitled as anyone to make observations about crime — particularly in the light of the 2006 murder of his cousin, Richard Bloom, and his friend, Brett Goldin, in Cape Town.