If the revival of Afrikaans culture is to be determined by plays like Donkerland, we’re certainly not moving forward, writes ANDREW WILSON
AFTER decades of cultural self- confinement, broken only sporadically, and then only by the minority, Afrikaans theatre, music and cabaret are back with new vigour. The clearest case in point was the untethered celebration at the 1996 Oudtshoorn Festival, where a culture was revisited, redefined and re-established with an enthusiasm the jaded Grahamstown Festival hasn’t seen in years. In the eye of the storm, however, was an epic play called Donkerland by prolific playwright Deon Opperman.
Opperman exploded on to the theatrical scene in 1984 with Mre is ‘n Lang Dag, a slice-of-life border play which debuted at the ATKV Kampustoneel Festival in Pretoria and went on to play to packed houses at the Market Theatre. Without reserve, the country’s critics hailed the play in glowing epithets — as ”Pinteresque”, ”Brechtian”, at the very least ”pioneering”. It secured instant Vita awards and placed Opperman firmly on the map.
Now, 12 years and 22 plays later, the hysteria has died down somewhat. When that same critical fraternity began commenting on the superficiality of Opperman’s increasingly English, mainstream projects and his reliance on tired formulas, he hit back and left to study film in America. On his return, he resumed both his work on straighter Afrikaans drama and his outspokenness towards his critics. In a 1994 television interview from Grahamstown he lashed out, saying ”the critics are my guests, and are not naturally invited to my productions”. As a result, some members of the press have had to buy their own tickets to see his work at festivals.
But now, with Donkerland, that’s all changed again. The mammoth production that attempts to document six generations of Afrikaner struggle was hailed, countrywide, by audience and critic alike. One newspaper called it ”a brilliant theatrical happening which provides a probing journey…”
But, if Donkerland is probing then it’s probing in the Reader’s Digest sense of the word. Operating in a time when Afrikaner culture is regrouping according to a changing political landscape, Donkerland, popular as it was, stands as testimony to the fact that a large portion of Afrikanerdom is unable to employ any real self-analysis when reviewing the journey this culture has travelled.
The play’s slightly ironic hindsight might elicit some recognition in the audience, but not insight. It parades a selection of Afrikaner character ”types” in representative situations, but does little more than portray the Afrikaner evolution as a series of emotional knee-jerk reactions to a land in flux, constantly and repeatedly stubbing their toes against the same rock; constantly falling back on a succession of cultural, political and religious myths. Fine. That may be what happened. But the audience, by the end of the play, is left no wiser than the characters, because Opperman does not investigate why or how the journey goes where it does. Or how the very same myths he markets to the audience are the ones that led to apartheid in the first place.
The audience stares transfixed as Meidjie, pioneer Pieter de Witt’s black concubine, helps deliver his child from the womb of his dead wife. We see her emotional bond with the Afrikaner extended to include her blessing on the continuance of his race. Her reward comes years later when she is buried alongside Pieter. Native and settler lie together, in the first generation already, propagating the myth of belonging and then extending it to the idea of destiny. And the audience quietly digests it all with a burp of satisfaction.
Similarly, the ending sees the Afrikaner forced to sign away his farm, robbed of his manhood and culture, while his sister, an ANC member, leaves for America. Despair and Horror! Is this what the struggle was for? For the grass of this unwelcoming, dark continent to cover the last graves as though the culture never existed? Like a soap opera, it blatantly reinforces fears and then leaves the audience asking ”What the hell now?”. If Donkerland is a retrospective docu-drama, it does itself and its audience a serious disservice.
By failing to dissect the way Calvinism transformed into cultural myth and civil religion, which influenced the evolution of Afrikaner culture; by concentrating on superficial political and cultural attitudes drenched with emotion, Opperman is as guilty as the cultural architects of the 1930s and 1940s who exploited popular myth and religion in order to narrow down the cultural vision; what writer NP van Wyk Louw called ”confining the culture”. The Broederbond, along with the FAK and the ATKV of the 1930s and 1940s, left their constituency with a legacy of oppression; Opperman leaves his audience in despair, without them quite knowing why.
Van Wyk Louw, one of the great narrative poets of the century, once wrote that ”the concept of limited ethnic particularity must disappear before the concept of full humanity with an ethnic connection”. He was opposed to the Broederbond’s limited Christian Nationalism; against art and culture speaking in strict Afrikaner or Christian National language and symbol.
He wasn’t alone. Poet Elizabeth Eybers decried what she called ”a thoroughly systematic exploitation of the herd instinct”. But despite the few dissenters, the Broederbond’s idea of ending what they termed ”the cultural chaos” took firm root within the population.
The few, like Eybers and Van Wyk Louw, and later theologians of the 1950s and 1960s like Ds MJ Redelinghuys, saw the danger coming. Wrote Redelinghuys in 1961: ”We have worked together so closely to free ourselves from English domination that the ideal of Church and State has virtually become one. From a historical point of view this attitude is understandable. Prophetically, however, it cannot be defended. We as a People and we as a Church have turned Afrikaner Nationalism, and with it apartheid, into an idol. We bow low before it.”
As in the Great Trek and the Anglo-Boer War, a vital core of Afrikanerdom is located within the three decades before 1948, yet Donkerland barely touches on the subtle ebb-and-flow of culture, religion and politics of this period. Why write an historical, episodic saga without using the opportunity to analyse and challenge? Why dabble with the same old heart- wrenching myths without subverting them in order to grant some insight? Pieter-Dirk Uys, Reza de Wet, Casper de Vries and Nathani’l have all confronted myth and symbol in different ways; unsentimentally, often grotesquely, but never waning in their attempts to understand how things happened — and why.
So why did Opperman write Donkerland? Perhaps he is far subtler than is apparent. Perhaps he senses a cultural revival. He is a talented, prolific and highly disciplined artist who knows his medium and his audience inside out, and backed by extensive research, Donkerland, with its bleak ending, is possibly designed to exploit the Afrikaner’s back- to-the-wall mentality under which, in the past, he has performed his greatest achievements. Does Opperman show his audience despair in order to spur them on? If he does, perhaps we should thank him. If not, perhaps we should dim the lights on Donkerland.