John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
It’s much easier to set up a myth than to shoot it down. Nevertheless, as we look deeper into the Pandora’s box of our hidden past, more and more seemingly invincible myths become open to scrutiny. We’ve had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that revealed a little of what was unleashed on a whole society and a subcontinent in the name of the myth of “total onslaught”. We’ve had the “Tsafendas and the tapeworm” myth, and in recent weeks I’ve also talked about tendencies towards creating new myths out of the stale myths of the Anglo-Boer South African War.
On Monday November 1, a short television series exploring new ways of looking at some of our most deeply entrenched national myths hits the screen. It’s called Saints, Sinners and Settlers (and I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that it will be broadcast, over five weeks, on SABC2. Tell your friends).
OK, let me declare an interest. I have been closely involved in the development and making of the series over the past three years, ultimately writing one and directing two of the episodes that finally made it into the can -the episodes that look at the warped perceptions of Jan van Riebeeck and the Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse that we have all grown up with. (The other episodes look at Lord Kitchener, Hendrik Verwoerd and Dingaan.)
It was a tough process. From the beginning there was the fundamental problem of coming to a consensus about how those of us involved in the creation of the series actually understood these various myths. It turned out that we all had different perceptions, depending on how and where we had grown up – Bantu Education, Larney Education and my own special breed of International Coconut Education made us all differ violently on almost all the facts and how they could and could not be interpreted.
Take Van Riebeeck. You should have seen the scenes of snot en trane in Phillip van Niekerk’s living room as the darkies yelled themselves black in the face, saying that Oom Jan was unquestionably a founding hero for the whole of the white tribe, while the whiteys turned purple as they denied it. Van Riebeeck? He was a nobody, they said. Things only started hotting up, hero-wise, at about the time of Piet Retief.
This only went to show how far apart we really still were, in those heady post- election days. Not only was Retief not a hero in my consciousness, he wasn’t even a presence. And so it went on.
Anyway, through the smoke of this often acrimonious debate we finally came up with what you are about to receive over the next five weeks. Considering the levels of personal antagonism that were reached on the way (including several close calls on a live re-enactment of the Retief murder, only in Parkview this time, and a brush with a replay of Blood River in Yeoville) and in spite of the usual nightmare of underfunding from the national broadcaster and lack of interest in our national saga from overseas, the results are very interesting. I won’t attempt to prejudice your opinion by giving my own glowing review (especially of my two episodes), but I will give you a little background to how the series was arrived at.
One day, before he became editor of the country’s leading weekly paper (“Africa’s best read”), Van Niekerk was killing time, like the rest of the civilised world, watching the OJ Simpson trial on TV. It struck him that it was extraordinary that something as boring as a long-winded murder trial could have attained the status of a cult soap opera, watched live from Rio to Rustenburg, from Anchorage to Auckland, by a polyglot audience made up of millions of people who had no personal knowledge of the people involved. It was a phenomenon that was only possible in the television age, an age that has always been regarded with some contempt by people like him and me. But, being a man of vision (OK, maybe I am angling for a promotion), Van Niekerk started wondering whether the power of television could not be harnessed to the vital debate about the nature of the country we had inherited, and knew so little about. “Could we use the idiot box to do something subversive?” is how he puts it. Subverting the myths that have kept us all enslaved in our separate kraals.
Van Niekerk’s biggest obsession was Dingaan – or rather, Van Niekerk’s own realisation, somewhere in the mid-point of life, that there needed to be a reconsideration of the Retief-as- hero/Dingaan-as-villain myth that he had grown up with. “Dingaan is the central Afrikaner myth,” he says. “The myth of betrayal, the idea that you can’t ever trust the native. That was the myth that drove the Afrikaner in the 20th century.” And it turned out that the central issue of that central myth, the one “fact” that gave the myth its power, was itself a myth – one of the biggest lies in South African history. (You’ll find out what I’m talking about on Monday night.)
Myths, of course, are always given exaggerated importance by anniversaries. This is the anniversary year of the first film (an Anglo-Boer War documentary) to be shot in South Africa – one of the first in the world. Not long thereafter, South Africa’s first Hollywood-style extravaganza, De Voortrekkers, was filmed and screened here.
De Voortrekkers was the film that lodged the Dingaan myth deep into the Afrikaner psyche. It is appropriate that the power of film should now be used to re-examine that same myth, and hopefully give us another way of understanding it.