Rian Malan
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Rian Malan (b. 1954 in Johannesburg) is a South African author, journalist and songwriter of Afrikaner descent.
Malan developed as a teenager a hazardous predilection for partying with township [i.e. black] artists. Avoiding the apartheid military draft, he moved to the USA to become a keen observer of and writer about violence in contemporary society. He was able to return to South Africa in the 1980s, where he wrote My Traitor's Heart, about modern South Africa: a memoir of growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa, in which he explores along the way race relations through prominent murder cases. In addition, he reflects on the history of his family, a prominent Afrikaner clan which migrated to the Cape in the 17th century and included Daniel François Malan, the South African Prime Minister who was a principal ideological force behind Apartheid doctrine.
In 2000, he wrote a widely-disseminated piece in Rolling Stone about the origin of the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in which he traced its history from its first recording by Solomon Linda a penniless Zulu singer through its adoption by The Weavers, The Tokens, many of the folksingers of the 1960s, and its appropriation by The Walt Disney Company in The Lion King.
In 2002, Malan began researching the statistics of AIDS in Africa, culminating in an article entitled "AIDS in Africa: In search of the truth"[1]. In his piece, Malan explored the ways and reasons AIDS estimates in Africa vary dramatically from organization to organization. Follow-up articles were published in December, 2003 in The Spectator[2] and NoseWeek, a South African news magazine ("Apocalypse When?"). His hypothesis was roundly criticised by national and international AIDS organisations[citation needed].
He has no children and recently separated from his wife, Constanza, an American journalist.
