The Classifier Book Report: Book Written by Wessel Ebersohn

This report is based upon The Classifier, written by Wessel Ebersohn. I chose this book specifically because I knew that hardly any students were going choose our own history and instead would prefer World War 1 or World War 2. I also wanted to read about apartheid from someone’s point of view that experienced although it is fictional. This book was purchased in CNA.

Introduction of the Author:

The book The classifier was written by Wessel Ebersohn. Ebersohn is most famous for writing historical fiction and for giving you a behind the scenes view of apartheid. He is the author of ten books all which have seen international editions as he gives the insight of what apartheid was actually like.

Summary:

The teenage love affair of Chris and Ruthie is set in the tumultuous political background of South Africa in the early 1970s. He comes from the white only zone of Red Hill and she comes from Greenwood park for the ‘outcasts’ otherwise as known as coloureds in that time. Ruth and Chris try to ignore the harsh realities of the fact that their love cannot survive in the forbidden pastures.

They first meet in a flea market as Chris was trying to establish his business their meeting move to more private areas in the fields then gradually onto Ruth’s house in Greenwood Park. They take all these risks not realizing that the odds are against them. They could simply not ignore that Chris’s father was head of the city’s Race Classification Office. The unstable trans-racial house of Ruth will crumble if provoked by the smallest engagement with authority seeing as two of Ruth’s family members her aunt Pearl and Uncle William had illegally white jobs since they were light enough to pass for white people.

With Chris this story captures the violence and confusion of growing up as a white boy in South Africa. Teenage angst as he loses his best friend who he had seen slowly deteriorating as he had developed a heart disease they could do nothing about. Even so he had not died from the disease he died from drowning. It shows how Chris dealt with the sorrow of losing a friend and brother and how he felt he could’ve done more to save him. One of the highlight of the stories is the peer pressure Ruth and Chris endured from friends but especially from each other to the point where that pressure to have sexual intercourse is what got them caught. The biggest struggle for Chris was that he did not have a good relationship with his father and that made it even more difficult to understand why his father did the job that he did.