I close «A Chain of Voices» not knowing if I'm free or slave. André Brinks beautiful and painful book from 1982 depicts a society and a chain of events leading to a group of slaves trying to gain freedom through force in South-Africa in 1925. The project is hopelessly doomed and the men are quickly captured and trialed. The story is presented as retrospective streams of consciuosness from a varied group of individuals who have been holding vastly different positions throughout the story. All the participants describe the experiences differently, and the narratives are, obiously, most accentuatedly different when the stories of the white/master-protagonists are juxtaposed with those of the slave protagonists.

It's a hard and hardening story. Building tensions, the conflict between the urge for conservation and the urge for change, the haves and the have-nots, the masters and the slaves, the frustrations, the lack of understanding, the self righteousness – it all makes for very little hope. Reading the book in 2009 it is even amazing to think that slavery actually ended at last – at least officially. And after the book was written even apartheid ended – officially. Injustice however, is alive and blossoming. Are we making small steps towards ending it or are we just fumbling?

Still, what I take away from this book more than anything else are the reflections on freedom that the protagonists make. The main master protagonist, Nicolaas van der Merwe, reflects in the last secounds of his life that the moment when he made himself master of his childhood friend Galant, was also the same moment when he chained himself and sealed his own fortune. What is freedom? The slaves needed their rebellion not to gain it but to learn it. The masters rarely felt their own. Galant comments that maybe freedom really is nothing huge and everlasting, but a small, private thing that you can only have for an hour or so at the time. ( )

Wonderful story, told from many perspectives. Based on a true story. ( )