‘The Rainy Season’: Journalist details South Africans’ struggles

When American journalist Maggie Messitt was 24 years old, she bought a one-way ticket to South Africa. This was in 2003, less than a decade after the end of apartheid, and Messitt was, as she describes in the opening of her narrative non-fiction work 'The Rainy Season,” 'green.”

But Messitt aspired to follow in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe and other immersion journalists ('access comes with trust, and trust comes in time,”), so she stayed in the rural South African village of Rooiboklaagte for eight years, listening to the residents as they collected water, spun wool, drank and laughed and buried their dead.

'The Rainy Season” (University of Iowa Press) is the result of Messitt's years in the field: a narrative non-fiction work exploring a tumultuous period in South African history as told through the lives of three village residents: Dankie, a high school student raised under Mandela's educational system; Thoko, a savvy middle-aged business woman, traditional healer and pub owner; and Regina, an elderly tapestry weaver and devout Catholic who struggles to make sense of the AIDS epidemic sweeping her nation. The result is a work as rich and complex as the South African landscape.

Messitt is a dedicated, sensitive recorder and she does her subjects - and her readers - justice as she seamlessly weaves South African history and culture into the narratives in order to provide readers with an accurate emotional account.

There are times, however, where Messitt becomes too concerned with tracking details and the individual narratives become heavy with side characters. But this, too, reflects the overall environment of the village: men travel for weeks at a time for work and women and children are forced to lean on one another, blurring the lines between family and neighbors, and giving new weight and meaning to personal connections.

In the style of her heroes, Messitt shows that the best way to truly understand a situation is to find one person's story, and the best way to find that story is to be still and listen: edicts all of us - journalists or not - should follow.