The Promise

Because apartheid ends between Part 1 and Part 2 of the novel, many characters assume that the country is headed for a steady improvement and never-before-seen racial harmony. The dangerous feeling of the country’s unrest appears to dissipate as the riots over racial inequality end. However, the novel gradually reveals that all this optimism is naïve and mismatched with the actual level of reckoning with past injustices that the country is willing to do. On the one hand, the government takes meaningful steps to enact a reckoning, such as the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. On the other hand, many white characters in the novel are not ready to treat the Black people they encounter with more respect.

By the end of the novel, even Amor’s gesture of finally giving Salome ownership of her house feels like an anticlimax because it can have only a limited effect on Salome’s life given her advanced age. This ending highlights the larger theme that past injustices are extremely difficult to address in lasting and meaningful ways, even for those with good intentions. While the novel does not suggest that those with good intentions should give up because of this difficulty, it does suggest that some effects of inequality leave long-lasting marks.

This theme also emerges through the deeply complex question of who land should belong to and how societies should make those decisions. The idea that the Swarts, who own their land thanks to the Dutch colonial presence in South Africa, deserve it most is highly contestable. As a clan mostly comprised of selfish, entitled promise-breakers, they hardly seem deserving. Through her years of patient, devoted service to the Swarts, Salome certainly seems deserving of the small home she lives in, if not much more.

At the end of the novel, however, the reader learns that Salome might not get to keep her house even though Amor finally grants her ownership. The government has begun investigating competing land claims to reverse injustices from South Africa’s colonial history. This complicates the question: It seems fair that descendants of Black South Africans who had land stolen from them should get an opportunity to reclaim it, and yet Salome’s claim to her property as a small reward for years of loyal service seems equally fair. By interjecting this looming problem at the end of the novel, Galgut points out that while the ethics of the novel’s central promise may be simple enough—Manie made a promise, so the Swarts should keep the promise—larger questions of land and property ownership can quickly become thorny in societies that have long allowed unjust systems to thrive. The complexity of these questions suggests that no system of private land ownership can offer universally fair outcomes.