I long for a South African society that's free of ideological forces - no society can ever really be free of ideological forces - but I wish it was free of power.

I should confess that I'm woefully under-read in South African fiction.

I think there's something very dark in the South African psyche. I think we live a lot of the time in a state of a very low-grade civil war; the levels of violence in South Africa are extremely high. In a way, the civil war that never happened is being played out in a covert way, so we live with a lot of very ugly things.

That's because the South African way of doing it is to give yourself advice.

Rian Malan was one of the first younger writers to perceive and write about a darkness in the South African psyche that goes deeper than mere politics. To some extent, that's my territory, too.

The South African government, unlike a lot of African governments, isn't poor.