Chris Louw
I read a book, I wrote a letter, and a floodgate opened. That would be the simplistic way of looking at an episode that has dominated the Afrikaans dailies’ letters pages for the past month. Because the overwhelming reaction to my open letter to Dr Willem de Klerk after reading his book Afrikaners: Kroes, Kras, Kordaat is an indictment of how deeply Afrikaners are feeling alienated from the illusory rainbow nation.
My open letter – a very, very angry letter, according to political commentator Harald Pakendorf – was first published by the Johannesburg daily Beeld a month ago. From the moment it appeared, Beeld was inundated by letters from its readers (at an average of 15 a day), the majority of whom shared my anger and for the first time dared speak out. My letter was subsequently published by Die Burger and Volksblad, with very much the same response: an unprecedented avalanche of letters, as if Afrikaners were only now becoming aware of stored feelings of deep resentment and anger.
No doubt I touched a raw nerve.
So why was I angry?
I resigned from my last Afrikaans news- paper in 1986, disgusted with the way political news was distorted to suit a verligte agenda which was meant to give apartheid a more acceptable face. Afterwards, I dedicated myself to a democratic dispensation – as editor of the liberal Die Suid-Afrikaan, as political writer for the Mail & Guardian, as freelancer and as part-time political activist.
Finally, democracy was achieved. And when De Klerk’s little book appeared earlier this year, I could easily identify with a lot of what the brother of former president FW de Klerk was saying.
That is, on an intellectual level. On an emotional level it was a completely different story.
But let me start with where my recent anger began. It ignited when Professor Willie Esterhuyse, retired philosopher from Stellenbosch, in a newspaper article accused Afrikaans speakers who were seriously and genuinely grappling with the diminished status of their language of conducting a debate that was “as stale as a glass of beer that had stood in the sun all day long”.
Up until that moment I had accepted, if uncomfortably, that Afrikaans (and all other African languages, for that matter) would be deliberately neglected by my employers at the SABC in favour of English. After all, I had sent my own two children to English schools so they would not suffer the ignominy of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism the way I did.
In his heyday, Esterhuyse was a leading light in the Afrikaner Broederbond, that infamous secret society for elitist Afrikaners who thought they knew better than anyone else what was good for the country. Like supporting apartheid, devising intellectual and theological and moral arguments in support of “separate development” and “nation states”, and using the Afrikaans language in mobilising church, academia and volk around Afrikaner nationalism, and racism.
In the early Nineties an ever so slight change became notable in Esterhuyse’s attitude, aptly described by poet Breyten Breytenbach: the Afrikaner elite made a historic about-turn from one political dispensation to a completely opposing one without missing a goose-step.
With the ANC in power and the Nats a bad relic of history, Esterhuyse is as fervent a supporter of the ruling party as ever before. No matter that the country had gone through a negotiated revolution, that what to their own children was projected as “the enemy” was now in power, that his previously dominant Afrikanervolk was suddenly a threatened minority, that it had become clear there was little empathy within government for even highly emotional issues like indigenous languages.
Esterhuyse hinted darkly at state- undermining tendencies displayed by those involved in a new debate about the resuscitation of Afrikaans.
Obviously, the language debate had been going on ever since Afrikaners lost their grip on power in 1994. The establishment of cultural organisations, run by grey men in grey suits wearing grey shoes and driving metallic grey Mercedeses, suddenly found they lacked the stomach for a fight. White men were not only jumping; they were smiling, not to make the new guys in power feel welcome but rather (Please! Please!) to make themselves seem more acceptable to their new bosses. Afrikaans – die vriendelike taal became the motto. The smiles became so fixed that the lips were hurting.
Meanwhile, affirmative action and transformation had become the buzz-words of the new elite.
On the receiving end are young white men, those between 30 and 50, who were branded with compulsory military service and who never really had a life of their own. In the patriarchal system of the past they were told to shut up and follow orders; now they are being told to shut up and transform.
What does transformation mean? No adequate definition has yet been provided. But in my case, SABC news boss Phil Molefe earlier this year in his submission on racism in the media to the Human Rights Commission made no bones about what he meant. Top management in the SABC, he boasted, was now 100% black; senior news management 80% black and 20% Indian. The problem area was middle management, where white managers still resisted transformation.
What transformation? Transforming ourselves out of our jobs, rolling over and playing dead?
Up until that moment I was one of those deluded by the notion that any struggle for my language rights would be contrary to the ideal of the one-nation democracy. Molefe in one stroke defined me out of his nation and out of my delusion.
Enter Dr Dan Roodt, one-time angry young student anarchist at Wits, draft-dodger who found refuge in France, and now businessman-cum-philosopher. And unlikely taalstryder. With acerbic wit bordering on viciousness, an exceptionally sharp intellect and an amazing range of reference, he introduced a completely new style to the stale language debate.
Activism became the key-word.
Afrikaans speakers, he argued, have worked hard and with innovation to establish their language as a modern and highly sophisticated medium – a functional medium which simultaneously carries within it echoes of the past: of a specific history, of sentiment and identity. It could not just be given away.
Afrikaans-speakers, many of whom had fatalistically accepted the inevitability of an Anglicised mono-cultural future, suddenly found their lazy assumption challenged as never before. And they became excited. The overwhelming sense of alienation and even depression gave way to a new optimism.
And equally suddenly, roles were reversed. Leading Broederbonders and other old establishment figures, including Esterhuyse, Willem de Klerk and former Vaderland editor Pakendorf, found themselves in the ranks of the new establishment. Fighting for the language, Pakendorf wrote, amounted to nothing more than navel-gazing. President Thabo Mbeki had much more pressing things to attend to than wasting his time on this irrelevant little sideshow.
On the side of the navel-gazers: dissident Afrikaans poet Breytenbach, former opposition leader Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, African National Congress supporter Professor Ampie Coetzee, Stellenbosch “lefty” Jannie Gagiano, even the grand liberal philosopher Johan Degenaar, the once-rejected (for being too independently minded) historian Hermann Giliomee, volkstater Carl Boshoff, and a host of past Afrikaner dissidents to the left and the right of Botha and De Klerk’s old National Party.
Those who were used to orientating themselves towards power were doing exactly what they were used to. Those with a cultivated sense of fairness found it easy to side with the new underdog.
And the underdog, in this case, was the Afrikaans language. “The language of the oppressor …” But how can a language “belong” to an oppressor if that very language is the only really non-racial language in the country, with more coloured than white speakers? (I know, I know: a politically incorrect but nevertheless a statistical factual statement!) How can a language be held responsible for the sins of a portion of its users? And when the past oppressors become a new minority, cannot the language, or rather the perceptions, be rehabilitated?
During the last years of apartheid, I was watching from the sidelines while Afrikaans newspapers were leading their readers up the garden path. I read the promises about “minority rights” and all the other non- negotiables. I knew they were lying.
While they were lying, young men were dying on the borders and in the townships, were committing the most horrendous atrocities in the name of fairness and justice and civilisation and volk en vaderland. As instructed by their elders.
Then, in the year 2000, six years after democracy, Willem de Klerk writes a book admoni-shing Afrikaners for their sins of the past, and preaching the new orthodoxy: lie low, keep quiet, don’t rock the boat … just quietly become part of the majority. Be seen and not heard, as we were told as children.
I read his book with growing disgust, searching for one, small admission: “I, Willem de Klerk, former leading intellectual in the Broederbond, was personally involved in the rationalisation and justification of an abhorrent and inhuman system.”
I never found that sentence. All I found was self-justification and pontification. And I felt cheated. And furious. As cheated and as furious as those unprecedented hundreds who now respond to my open letter clearly feel: the foot-soldiers of apartheid who have again been let down by their leaders, both old and new.
Call us navel-gazers, if you like. But the process now under way is necessary. It is a thera-peutic process. It is the process of a nearly lost generation getting in touch with its real feelings. Only now do we realise the extent of the post-traumatic stress that we are suffering after decades of following instructions and being fed lies by our elders. Only now are we coming to terms with the loss of respect for the patriarchy.
Obviously, our black compatriots suffered much more than we did. But for the time being establishing our own authenticity is our main concern. This no doubt will have a ripple effect, and everyone else will be touched by the outcome. We all – black and white – need internal truth commissions as never before.
As Afrikaners our message is simple: Never, never again. Never will we take orders like we used to. Not to our own detriment, not even for the sake of the new South Africa.
As a minority we do not claim rights. But we do have our own interests, most specifically our language. We will be part of the new South Africa. But not sheepishly so and certainly not unconditionally.
Chris Louw is executive producer: Monitor and Spektrum on Radiosondergrense. His open letter is now available in book form. Ope Brief aan Willem de Klerk is published by Praag, costs R20 (all inclusive) and can be ordered from PO Box 3103, Daifern 2055