The Promise

Spoilers ahead

In The Promise (2021) by Damon Galgut, the passage of time is marked not by milestones but by funerals. Set against the backdrop of South Africa’s fraught transition from apartheid to democracy, the novel compresses multiple decades into four tightly written chapters. Structured around four deaths across the decades, the novel maps the slow disintegration of a white South African family in the post-apartheid era.

The Swart family becomes a point of convergence between private decay and a country’s unresolved past. At the center lies an unkept promise: a commitment made by the dying matriarch to transfer ownership of a small house to Salome, the Black domestic worker who has spent most of her life in service to the family. That the promise is quietly ignored by the surviving members becomes the novel’s defining thread.

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, Galgut’s novel is a compact yet searing meditation on family, history, and the collective weight of promises broken over generations. What appears modest in scope—a family’s refusal to honor a dying woman’s word—unfolds into a wider account of avoidance, deferment, and ethical paralysis.

Damon Galgut and the Post-Apartheid Novel

Galgut was already a distinguished figure in South African literature before The Promise, but this novel presents his most sustained treatment of post-apartheid disillusionment. His earlier works—particularly The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010)—had already established his interest in dislocation and moral ambivalence. Here, he brings those concerns into sharper focus by confronting not only the failures of individuals but also the evasions that have shaped a national identity.

The Swart family stands in for a particular demographic—white, Afrikaans-adjacent, neither especially rich nor politically engaged. They are not powerful enough to manipulate history, but they are well-placed to ignore its demands. In this, they resemble a broader post-apartheid society that has chosen forgetting over accountability.

Where previous South African novels often framed the collapse of apartheid in terms of revolution or reconciliation, Galgut takes a quieter, more corrosive view. He doesn’t argue for dramatic change; he exposes the structures that prevent it. The Swart family is not evil—they are evasive. Their refusal to fulfill a simple vow becomes a microcosm of a national failure to reckon with its past history.

Structure and Style: Four Deaths and the Shape of a Nation

The novel’s narrative structure resists easy chronology. Time leaps forward between sections, and the intervening years are glimpsed only in fragments. Galgut uses an omniscient voice that glides between characters and even addresses the reader, creating a style that feels both intimate and alienating. This technique echoes the disjointed nature of memory and of history.

The Funeral as Narrative Anchor

Each section of The Promise opens with a funeral, a structural choice that lends the novel a rhythm both ritualistic and disjointed. The deaths—first Rachel (mother), then Manie (father), followed by Astrid (second child) and Anton (eldest child)—punctuate the family’s history, marking not transformation but attrition. Galgut does not present these deaths as climactic events. Instead, they serve as entry points into a version of time that advances by omission. What occurs between them is rarely dramatized. The reader is given only the consequences, not the developments that led to them.

This structure reflects how both the family and the country move forward without resolving what lies beneath. Time is not continuous; it is segmented, unfinished, and often indifferent. Galgut draws attention not to what happens but to what is allowed to fade. In between deaths, the family grows smaller, not through conflict but through dispersal. The promise first made at Rachel’s deathbed remains unresolved for decades, not because anyone actively prevents it, but because it is consistently deferred, overshadowed by routine matters and a refusal to act until it is nearly too late.

Dislocated Perspective and Narrative Drift

Galgut employs a shifting third-person perspective that rarely settles. The narration slips in and out of characters’ thoughts, often within the same sentence, without warning or typographical signal. This technique—an exacting form of free indirect discourse—allows the narrator to absorb the vocabulary, prejudices, and rhythms of a character’s inner life while maintaining an external vantage point. Characters are observed from within and without, their perceptions interwoven with the narrator’s voice but never fully aligned with it. The result is a tone that withholds intimacy while exposing vulnerability.

This dislocated perspective mirrors the novel’s thematic focus on avoidance. No single character holds the narrative; no one voice is privileged. Instead, the text oscillates between voices, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes elegiac, sometimes flatly observational. While Galgut never commits to a full stream of consciousness, certain passages carry its influence, particularly in their momentum and elasticity. The style remains consistent throughout—measured, precise, and unsentimental—mirroring the emotional reserve that defines the Swart family. The fragmented point of view becomes a formal expression of the novel’s deeper concern: the difficulty of maintaining a stable sense of self, memory, or duty in a country preoccupied with forgetting and moving on.

Thematic Reflections on Post-Apartheid South Africa

The themes of The Promise emerge through restraint rather than declaration. Galgut relies on structure, silence, and repetition to articulate the pressures that shape both the Swart family and the society beyond it. The novel’s themes are not presented as lessons; they unfold as conditions.

Deferred Justice

The novel’s central question—whether the promise made to Salome will ever be fulfilled—unfolds over decades of hesitation and inaction. The house, modest in scale but heavy with meaning, remains occupied but untransferred. Salome stays on the property, yet her claim to it is never officially recognized. Each family member who inherits the land avoids confronting the matter directly. Their indifference is not loud or combative; it is procedural, buried in paperwork and postponed conversations. Galgut places the reader in this atmosphere of delay, where every opportunity to resolve the issue passes with quiet neglect.

Even when movement occurs, it does not erase what came before. The long pause between promise and fulfillment hollows out any sense of closure. The narrative hints at final gestures and late attempts at reparation but does so without granting emotional vindication. If justice arrives, it arrives diminished, sidelined by time and stripped of symbolic power. The novel does not ask whether the promise is kept, but whether it matters when its fulfillment finally arrives.

Obligation and Evasion

Throughout The Promise, evasion operates not as strategy but as instinct. The Swart siblings do not actively resist their mother’s wish; they simply leave it unaddressed. Amor, the youngest, refuses to forget, but her position is treated more as a burden than a virtue. The others recognize the validity of the promise, yet decline to treat it as their problem. Galgut maps this behavior with precision. He avoids making villains of his characters, and in doing so, reveals something more troubling: how easily responsibility dissolves when no one insists on carrying it.

By the end of the novel, the consequences of delay remain visible, even as an effort is finally made to honor the promise. The act of transferring the house takes place, but Galgut withholds any suggestion that this gesture restores what was lost. What could have been resolved decades earlier occurs only after the original intent has been worn down by time and neglect. The deed may change hands, yet the harm caused by years of silence and avoidance is not undone. Obligation, in Galgut’s telling, is not dramatized as conflict; it appears as something quietly set aside, left for someone else to resolve.

Inheritance and Silence

Inheritance in the novel functions on two planes. Material assets pass through the Swart family by law and custom, largely unchallenged. Moral inheritance, however, proves far more difficult to negotiate. Rachel’s promise, while unrecorded, becomes the axis on which the family’s integrity is tested. No will contains it. No legal mandate enforces it. Its only power lies in memory, and memory proves a fragile custodian. Over time, the siblings’ accounts shift. The original clarity of Rachel’s intent becomes subject to doubt, then to indifference.

Silence grows into the novel’s most persistent response. Salome rarely speaks, and when she does, her words carry no authority in the eyes of the family. She waits without protest, not because she accepts her exclusion, but because there is no channel through which her claim can be voiced. Even at the point where action is finally taken, the silence is not broken. What has been withheld is offered, yet no one speaks of what was lost in the delay.

Memory and Forgetting

In the book, memory is unreliable, malleable, and often self-serving. Rachel’s final words, once vivid to Amor, become blurred in the family’s collective account. Each retelling weakens the original claim, making those who benefit from inaction doubt its authenticity. Galgut’s narrative structure, with its temporal gaps and indirect narration, mirrors this process. What happened is less important than how it is remembered, and that distinction shapes the novel’s emotional tone.

This erosion of memory reflects a national mood shaped by fatigue and revision. South Africa’s transition demanded public remembrance, but over time, the act of remembering became more symbolic than functional. Galgut’s characters reflect this shift. They acknowledge the past only in fragments, and even those fragments are softened by interpretation. The longer the promise remains unfulfilled, the less its origin matters; what was once a commitment becomes a disputed memory, easier to forget than to honor.

The National Implication of the Broken Promise

While The Promise is centered on a single family, its implications extend far beyond the Swarts. The novel’s title refers to more than a spoken vow. It gestures toward the broader failure to translate political liberation into meaningful restitution. The promise of a new South Africa—just, equal, repaired—remains suspended.

The house at the edge of the property is on a minor piece of land. Its legal transfer would not alter the family’s position in any substantial way. Yet their reluctance to act reveals the deeper structures at play. The refusal is not material; it is symbolic. To recognize Salome’s claim is to acknowledge the historical foundation of that claim and, by extension, the unearned nature of their own inheritance.

By the novel’s end, Salome receives legal ownership of the house, decades after the promise was first made. The transfer, while official, arrives so late that it carries little sense of resolution. Galgut closes the novel not with triumph but with restraint. The fulfilled promise stands as a muted gesture whose significance has already began to fade.

Selected Passage with Analysis

Amor looks through the window and sees Salome standing outside. The sight recalls a moment from two weeks earlier, when Rachel, already dying, asked her husband Manie to give Salome ownership of the house she had long occupied. Amor had been in the room during that conversation, seated quietly in the corner. Her parents had forgotten she was there. At the time, the scene seemed distant to her, but now, in light of Rachel’s death and the funeral, it returns with greater clarity.

The quote — “They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them” — draws a direct line between Amor’s brief invisibility and Salome’s continual erasure. In that moment, Amor begins to understand the difference between presence and recognition. She had occupied the same space as her parents, but they had spoken as if she did not exist. The memory forces her to recognize that Salome has lived in that condition for years, serving the family while remaining unseen.

Galgut uses free indirect discourse to fold Amor’s thoughts into the narration without clear transition. The line arrives quietly, without framing, echoing the way Salome’s presence has been overlooked for years. This stylistic choice mirrors the novel’s deeper concern: some truths are not spoken aloud but sit within silence, unnoticed until they surface. Amor’s recognition emerges not as a turning point, but as something embedded in the narrative — present from the start, though only now coming into focus.

Further Reading

Damon Galgut on Confronting South Africa’s Racist History With Booker-Winning The Promise by Eloise Barry, Time

Booker Prize: Damon Galgut’s The Promise is a reminder of South Africa’s continued and difficult journey to a better future by Daniel Conway, The Conversation

Damon Galgut on his Booker winner The Promise: ‘Death sets things off’ by Frederick Studemann, Financial Times

‘African writing should be taken seriously’: Damon Galgut, winner of the 2021 Booker Prize by Nawaid Anjum, Substack