It is the cultural equivalent of boerewors, beefy but not quite steak. Despite a hefty fat content, it has also nonetheless remained the staple of white South African homes. While it may no longer claim to be the most widely read magazine in the country – True Love has a readership of 2,297,000 – it outsells all South African magazine titles, across all languages. According to its latest ABC figures, the magazine’s editorial brand of celebrity gossip and down-home epiphany motivates 342,130 people to buy the magazine every month. With a readership pegged at 2,157,000, the magazine also commands roughly 25% of the 8 million readers of general interest titles appealing to both sexes.
If ever there was any doubt, Huisgenoot is baas.
I intentionally phrased my statement in the language I did. Despite its undeniable publishing success, urbane English speakers have always viewed Huisgenoot rather obliquely. Maybe this is due to its status as pre-eminent symbol of Afrikanerdom. Rather than this being problematic, though, it tends to pose a pertinent question. What is a magazine with the editorial heft of Huisgenoot doing to disentangle the Afrikaner nation from a history of baaskap and historical nationalism? More pithily, how is the magazine restating the Afrikaner’s role as member of a participatory, non-racial democracy? Quite interestingly, it appears.
But before we get there it is useful to look back, to describe the awkward origins of Afrikaans language magazines, and more particularly Huisgenoot. This rather fascinating bit of publishing history tends to speak of the travails of the Afrikaaner nation generally. According to Irma du Plessis, a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, the first impetus for the recognition of Afrikaans as a print language came from the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaanders (GRA), a group established in the Paarl in 1875. The GRA produced its own magazine, Die Afrikaanse Patriot.
What followed was a period of intense ‘activism’ around the Afrikaans language. Key milestones include the formation of the National Party in 1914, followed shortly thereafter, in 1915, by the establishment of Nasionale Pers. Interestingly, the launch of Huisgenoot in May 1916, by the Afrikaanse Taal Vereniging (Afrikaans Language Association), prefaced the recognition of Afrikaans as the second official language by almost a decade The first translation of the Bible in Afrikaans would only arrive in 1933.
From its inception, the new monthly set about offering idiosyncratic interpretations of South Africa’s then recently amalgamated society – the Union of South Africa. The cover icons were a mix of popular Afrikaner icons, usually deceased Boer leaders, poets or important dominees. Ornate, hand-drawn, decorative lines, invoking popular graphic traditions of the period, framed these images. Short biographies inside described the cover ‘stars’.
“Die Huisgenoot certainly participated energetically in the construction of a Voortrekker past,” says a researcher who has requested anonymity. “Writers in Huisgenoot elaborated upon — a heroic, violent and poignant volksgeskiedenis [folk history] of famous leaders and of ordinary people.”
Substitute the famous leaders for media and sport celebrities and Huisgenoot’s editorial template remains markedly unchanged. “Articles about real people, their sorrows and their joys,” is how editor Esmare Weideman currently positions the magazine. Formerly Alice Bell’s deputy at Fair Lady, Weideman describes Huisgenoot as a magazine filled with “topical background features about news events [that] touch the lives of average South African families”. Key to the editorial success is the magazine’s commitment to “non-controversial” content.
Looking back on formative issues of Huisgenoot, the idyll of impartial content certainly represented an ambition rather than actuality. A seemingly inane reader’s photo submission competition launched with the first issue offers a surprisingly illustrative point for digression here. The competition aimed at celebrating the unified country’s beauty and became an area of enthusiastic reader participation. In fact, the magazine had no official photographer in the first seven years of its existence.
Aside from images of surviving stalwarts of the Great Trek, famous Boer generals and scenic landscapes, the submissions included amateur ethnographic studies of black South Africans. These were often captioned with scurrilous copy. One example includes a 1919 image of a black bridal pair and their two companions. The image was simply captioned, “A Half Civilized Basotho Wedding”.
Recent writings in Huisgenoot suggest a completely different trajectory for the magazine. One example that has garnered widespread attention is a reportage piece from 2003. Authored by senior Huisgenoot writer Hannelie Booyens, “Teach Us to Dance to the Rhythm of Africa” is a poignant story invested in recent South African history.
On 30 December 1993 Ginn Fourie’s daughter was killed in the Heidelberg Tavern in Cape Town. Told in simple yet engaging language, Booyens’ article recounts Fourie’s meeting with former Apla commander Letlapa Mphahlele, at his rural home in Limpopo Province. The story also describes one white woman’s attempt “to bring conciliation (sic) on a scale hitherto undreamed of in this country”. The work has earned Booyens a nomination for a 2003 Mondi Paper Magazine Award.
“Both Esmare and I were very keen to do the story,” says Booyens. “Esmare put a lot of effort into making it happen, especially in convincing Ginn that we wouldn’t sensationalise her story.”
What particularly intrigued me about this piece is how deeply it is rooted in the prevailing narrative of reconciliation. If early editions of Huisgenoot created the archetype of black South Africans as loyal servants – agterryers and former slaves – Booyens work presents a radically revised vision of what South Africa can achieve.
“One concern throughout was that the story would run the risk of offending conservative readers,” she admits, stating that reader response eventually tended to be rather mixed. “I myself received a few moving letters from ex-combatants responding to my discussion of soldiers on both sides of the political spectrum feeling let-down.”
In terms of general Huisgenoot content, this is hardly the type of stuff one numbly reads while tiding away time before a doctor’s appointment.
“Analysts who so easily dismiss Huisgenoot as a superficial, sensationalist, mass market, no brain title should not underestimate the huge role Huisgenoot is playing in normalising this society, and taking its vast readership with it,” argues Weideman.
“Magazines always follow the trends suggested by their target audiences,” adds Irna van Zyl, part-founder of New Media Publishing and creative and editorial publisher of the upper-income titles Insig and VISI. “There are a lot of Afrikaners involved in reconciliation and magazines are beginning to reflect that.”
Booyens herself is a good example. She comes from a family with strong right-wing roots, and was formerly a journalist with the conservative Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger. Despite this, Booyens herself was once a member of the ANC Women’s League, her one brother a member of the communist party. In 1993, at the time of Chris Hani’s murder, her family was the subject of an investigation by a Dutch documentary journalist. The cumulative effect of the documentary and the revelations it unearthed effectively split the family.
Not that it is unusual for Afrikaans magazines to offer themselves as homes to dissident and outsider personalities. The novelist Koos Prinsloo was both a sub and book editor at De Kat, while Ryk Hattingh controversially edited the adult title Loslyf. Rather less contentiously, C Louis Leipoldt wrote a series of columns in Huisgenoot, between 1942 and 1947, now translated into English under the title “Culinary Treasures”.
“Huisgenoot used to be called the poor man’s university,” comments van Zyl on the strong literary heritage infusing Afrikaans language magazines. “To a certain extent, when we repositioned Insig we thought about how to bring back the substance and critical thinking that existed in early Huisgenoot, but without necessarily towing the previous political line.”
It is not simply reconciliation that constitutes the content of Insig, a magazine originally modelled on the Spectator and New Yorker titles. The May 2004 issue, for instance, included an in-depth conversation with Rian Malan concerning his firebrand statements on HIV/Aids. The cover ‘stars’ were Antjie Krog and young novelist Jackie Nagtegaal. If there were hints of old-time Huisgenoot on the cover, gone were the famous Boer leaders and dominees.
While titles such as Insig offer a good vantage on a progressive new Afrikaans culture, less easy to define is Loslyf.
“The magazine is read by a predominantly conservative rural white audience,” says editor Eugene Goddard, “plus a number of coloured readers.”
Since the halcyon days of porn on every street corner and sell out print runs, the magazine has had to come to terms with the twin challenges of gentrified skin magazines such as FHM and the internet.
“I think one thing that attracts readers is the level of our journalism,” argues Goddard. “If you simply want titillation you can log onto the web. Loslyf readers are interested in how we use the Afrikaans language. I once wrote a piece on the history of swearing in Afrikaans. Unlike Hustler, which is more universal in its content, Loslyf is local.”
Also keen to emphasise the value of 100% local content is the award winning title VISI. A décor and design quarterly, VISI was launched in 1998 and is currently owned by New Media Publishing. Despite an abundance of competitors, the magazine recently announced a bold move: it would offer an English language version.
When VISI polled readers it found a quarter of them to be English. Furthermore, 30% of its existing readers wanted an English-language version. Similar facts once prompted Huisgenoot to launch a sister, English language title You. Unlike Huisgenoot, which translates about 80% of its Afrikaans content into English, VISI‘s content is fully translated.
“Although its language content is idiomatic, we realised its visual content is broad based,” remarks van Zyl.
A seemingly straightforward insight, van Zyl’s words nonetheless encapsulate something of the immense journey travelled by Afrikaans magazines. Where once even the pictures in the magazines were problematic Afrikaans magazines are variously, even if sometimes imperfectly, unburdening themselves of their historical legacy. Even the ideological purity of the language is splintering. In her Insig interview, the youthful Nagtegaal prefaced things by asking: “Should we speak Afrikaans or Engfrikaans?”
Market Snapshot
With a controlling interest in more than 60% of the country’s total circulation, Media24 is the undisputed leader in the magazine print sector. Its two key Afrikaans titles, Huisgenoot and Sarie, are also national leaders in their categories. According to the July – Dec 2003 ABC results Sarie (146,257) outsold rival Caxton-owned title Rooi Rose (127, 271) to become the country’s largest selling women’s title – in any language. Sarie recorded a penetration of 12,6% in the LSM 9-10 market.
A look at Amps 2003b, however, tends to present a different picture, with high sales volumes not necessarily translating into readership volumes. Sarie claims a readership of 915,000, which is a long way off True Love‘s 2,297,000 and also short on Fair Lady‘s 1,051,000.
Another noticeable trend is Huisgenoot‘s consistent downward sales graph. In the audit period July – December 1994, it recorded sales of 517,672. Since then sales have slowly atrophied, the title’s current sales pegged at 342,130 (July – Dec 2003). It was 395,371 in the period Jan – June 2000. One theory to explain this decline could be the increasing splintering of the Afrikaans readership market. New Media Publishing, owner of the niche titles VISI and Insig, recently launched the 160-page glossy magazine Wegbreek. The title is positioned in the popular outdoor magazine market.