The Promise

Damon Galgut

2021

Full hand dyed, mono printed, impressed, scarf jointed fair calfskin with triple backpared onlays, hand tooling in silver and black with painted highlights. Doublures hand dyed calfskin with backpared onlays on printed Griffen Mill Early Wove. Endpapers are dyed and mono printed. Hand coloured edges. Hand sewn silk endbands. 

Underpinning this book, behind the themes of apartheid and racism, are the constantly returning motifs of the veld landscape, the grasses, the lightning, the koppie hill, the tree. I chose to bring these centre and front. A huge thunderstorm rolls over an expansive Pierneef landscape of the high veld grasslands. A lightning bolt hits a tree, (or is it a menorah), a pivotal event in the book, but also a symbol of the majority power of the white minority raining down on the black population, a people with insignificant power but deep roots.

Inside the doublures feature a photograph by Gideon Mendel (reproduced with his kind permission) from his series ‘The Struggle’. “After the funeral of a three-year-old child shot in the head by a policeman’s rubber bullet, angry mourners clash with the police near the family’s home. In this confrontation a woman flings a stone at a policeman who is levelling his shotgun, while a child carrying a plate from the funeral feast runs away.” The author must have seen this photograph before writing the episode in which the son, a white soldier, shoots a black woman who has picked up a rock to throw at him. It was taken in the township of Atteridgeville in 1985 during the anti apartheid struggles, the precise same time and place as the book. And surely is marked in the line in the Booker publicity film: “I woke up”.