In 1990, a South African journalist named Rian Malan published a
blood-soaked memoir of his home country, "My Traitor's Heart,"
that became an instant classic. Published at the height of the
anti-apartheid movement, the brutal account of the ways South
Africans killed each other briefly made the young Afrikaner with
rock-star looks the toast of the American literary scene.  "My
Traitor's Heart" wasn't the standard white African confessional.
Mr. Malan, descended from a prominent Boer family, worked as a
crime reporter in Johannesburg in the 1970s and was appalled by
the horrors of apartheid. But he was equally appalled by the
lies of those fighting against it. One section of "My Traitor's
Heart" related how a Zulu man, Simon Mpungose, orphaned as a
child, fell into a life of crime that culminated in a murder
spree in which he bludgeoned white people with a hammer. Mr.
Malan's account of the court case leaves no doubt as to how the
cruelties of apartheid drove the man to his crimes. Most
journalists would have