In the Mondi Magazine Awards supplement distributed with this issue (we produce and design the booklet on behalf of Mondi) the winning piece by Rian Malan, a riveting profile of JM Coetzee, contains the following: “Our ancestors bestrode Africa like giants, slaughtering game, digging holes for gold, subjugating everyone. When the tide turned, we steeled ourselves for Armageddon, but nothing happened. The enemy came to power, but no vengeance was taken. They were even willing to forgive us, provided that we fell to our knees and said sorry. I experienced this as totally humiliating. White males had become ridiculous, and we were heading towards irrelevance.”
As the rest of the piece and Malan’s acclaimed book My Traitor’s Heart might suggest, for “white males” read “Afrikaner”. Of course white English speakers could have been equally complicit in South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, but the purpose of this issue is not to assign blame. It is rather to explore how the concept of “Afrikanerdom” is reflected in Afrikaans media, and whether the new definitions deal with Malan’s problem of “irrelevance”.
We chose Dr Frederik van Zyl Slabbert as the entry point to the discussion for obvious reasons: his anti-apartheid credentials and enduring top-level engagement with the issues. Asks Slabbert (page 16): “Who are we? Do we care about the language? Do we preserve Afrikaans as the language of science?”
The media professionals propose interesting answers to these deeply existential questions. Herman Wasserman writes (page 19) that Die Burger‘s editor Arrie Rossouw “no longer refer[s] to Afrikaans speakers as ‘Afrikaners’, but more inclusively as ‘Afrikaanses’.” Phillip de Wet notes (page 25) that editors like Insig‘s Elmari Rautenbach see Afrikaans speakers moving outside the “laager” to a self-definition that embraces international popular culture — Rautenbach’s view is that while ten years ago Afrikaans publishers “could have cashed in on” the cultural threat, they certainly can’t anymore.
But somebody needs to be doing the cashing in. There’s big money in this market. Ida Jooste reminds us (page 35) that Afrikaans speakers account for a quarter of the country’s household expenditure. Harry Herber’s point (page 31) is that the segment makes up 40% of LSM 10. And that, no matter what anyone says, is far from irrelevant.