White gangster’s memoir looks at racial injustice

Kalk Bay researcher, teacher and writer, Andries Du Toit launched his book A Blow to the Head at the Book Lounge in Roeland Street on Wednesday October 30.

The story revolves around an encounter with a white man — who turns out to be a gangster — who is being rude to a black waitress in the cafeteria at an Atlantic seaboard health club.

A month later he finds himself roughed up in a carpark and the target of payback.

In conversation with decolonial psychologist and masculinities studies at Stellenbosch University, Kopano Ratele, Du Toit said the book is a memoir through a lens that brought him to that fateful confrontation.

It’s a journey of discovery with themes of justice, race and inequality where he confronts himself, the country and the world we live in.