Antjie Krog’s new play is about dialogue – across colour and history, and paint
Michael Rautenbach
Viewing Antjie Krog’s play Waarom is Di wat Vr Toyi-Toyi Altyd So Vet? at Potchefstroom’s Aardklop festival last October, critic Stephen Gray noted it was “surely destined to become a classic in the repertoire”. Now translated by Krog into English, bearing the equally long title, Why Is It That Those Who Toyi-Toyi in Front Are Always So Fat? the play has arrived at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre. It is directed Marthinus Basson and performed by Tess van Staden and Nomsa Xaba.
“Krog’s scalding, scathing way with language is wonderfully cut and thrust,” wrote Gray about the play that inspired in its audience “painful and irreverent laughter”.
Playwriting is a new field for Krog, known largely for her poetry and her recent personal exploration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull.
In 1999 Krog received the prestigious Hiroshima Prize and this year has seen to fruition a translation of the novel Domein van Glas by Dutch writer Henk van Woerden.
Your book Country of My Skull, much of your poetry and now this play is very much about a struggle for identity. Who am I, how do I fit in?
I think all South Africans at this stage are redefining themselves. Who are we? Are we a solid black bloc? Are we a people who have been oppressed? Are we just victims? Are we as Afrikaners the people of the past 30 years or do we also have another past? Coloured people are struggling with this. It is healthy, it means that after 1994 things have fundamentally changed, people are feeling themselves to be out of the definitions of the past. We are still, all of us, looking for a new definition, and hopefully out of that a new South African identity will emerge.
Was there a time when you were more Boer than you are now?
I have a problem if people want to give me space only because I’m a Boer, or only as a Boer. I want to think that people are now free to take on as many identities as they feel comfortable with. I don’t like being labelled and told “You’re a Boer and as a Boer we like you” or, “You should be a Boer and this is how a Boer should be.” I actually resent that.
But you’ve changed, obviously, from what you were as a child growing up to what you are now. Have you moved away from some sort of Boerdom?
I do not actually come from a conservative background. I was brought up in a house where my mother was a writer, and we were frequently visited by other writers and a lot of politicians. My family, since they arrived in South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries, was very involved in politics. There is a photograph in Parliament of the first raad (board) or something and there is a Krog on it.
There was another one, that has now been taken down, of my great-grandfather Serfontein. So we have always been involved or interested in politics. But for me the essence, I would say, as I perceive the Afrikaner during the Anglo-Boer South African War, is that we stood for what is just and for what is right and from that perspective I haven’t moved.
Can you remember your most racist action, or thought?
Weet jy, ek kan eintlik die teenoorgestelde onthou, maar dit is nou seker [You know, I can actually remember the exact opposite, but that is probably] neither here nor there. While we were living in Kroonstad, one day the black woman behind the till at the grocery shop called me aside. But she took me into a room and said to me, “You know we all, the staff working here, just want to thank you for the human way in which your children treat us whenever they [are] here and the way they speak to us.” And I was incredibly upset because it’s such a small thing. And you realised how easy it is to start to change things. It haunted me for months after that.
I grew up on a farm, so we had interaction with the black children. Right from the beginning when you go to one school and they to another, they have a specific kind of house you have another one. You have elastoplast when you get hurt, they don’t.
The sense of injustice is in your face. Maybe if you live in cities or towns it is easier not to be aware of it.
The system of apartheid was so effective that you only met farmworkers or those that worked in the house. I was 21 years old when I for the first time met a black man who had a university degree. At that moment it brought it all out how absolutely effective the system had been.
Your play deals with apartheid and its legacy – do you think it will pull in an audience?
I don’t know – remember it started off as a lunchtime monologue, and then it got a life of its own. But I wouldn’t say the play is about the truth commission. The play is about the effort of two races to get into a dialogue – not an academic dialogue but an ordinary dialogue where both have a lot at stake. It doesn’t cut out the humour that comes with it and the anger and the irritation and the racism.
After I’d written the dialogue I realised that no dialogue between white and black in this country can take place without the framework of the past. It would be dishonest to say people just talk now without any thought or emotional connection to the past. So the history is there, but it’s in the form of poetry, in a sense the primal voices of the past.
The images of the truth commission were very much those of the perpetrators, white Afrikaans men, and the victims – black mothers – crying about their murdered children. Where is the voice of white women?
I would rather ask, where are the white men’s voices now? Because they were so crucial and active in the past, I would like to hear more from them about how they are now dealing with what happened and helping us to understand what their thinking was. They should be helping the white population in formulating ways of dealing with what they did. But they are now either silent or have opted to deal with other things.
What I do find is that a lot of white women actually thought differently. I remember that in the Free State before the Nineties the people who got involved with the African National Congress were basically white women – certainly more white women than white men in the Free State got involved in the struggle.
So in that sense one doesn’t want to exonerate white women, but they were thoroughly marginalised in the previous dispensation – hemmed in to raise the nation. Volksmoeders, to be the raisers of good Afrikaners – so I’m not so hard on wanting answers from them or wanting voices from them as I am on the white men.
The two characters in your play are women – one black, one white. Are you saying something about the way women deal with these issues?
One of the things is to say that women are dealing with race on a variety of levels. They deal with it as mothers, they also deal with it professionally and they deal with it poetically. Women are also trying to take ownership of the debate about race – and I find it a more valuable debate than the kind of race debate you hear among men or among political leaders. Because the debate is about power I think women deal with it in a fundamentally different way.
How do you think the generation that follows us will respond to our apartheid history?
I think we should be very much aware that the children of those who bore the brunt of apartheid will be profoundly affected. In Germany research has been done on the effects on the children of the perpetrators – they, too, were seriously affected. So we have coming a second and third generation who will act in particular ways because of what their parents did or did not do, and we should be prepared for that.
How are the preparations for the play going?
I think I’ve been spoilt. We have two formidable actors in Tess van Staden and Nomsa Xaba and then we have the director, Marthinus Basson – so you have a large safety net. What I’m particularly thrilled about is the way Marthinus is dealing with the poetry in the play. I’ve seen poetry on stage and I’ve always thought it didn’t belong. But then after Marthinus directed it I realised it depends on how you deal with it.
How do you feel about being awarded the Hiroshima Prize?
Haai jinne, dit verbaas my [Good grief, that surprises me]. It was nice to receive something that acknowledges that you can do something with culture and with art.
What is brewing in Antjie Krog? What can we expect from you next?
Ek wil net ‘n Afrikaans volume of poetry skryf [I only want to write an Afrikaans volume of poetry].
Why Is It That Those Who Toyi-Toyi in Front Are Always So Fat? is on at the Barney Simon Theatre at the Market Theatre Complex until May 6. For information Tel: (011) 832-1641