For some reason or the other, I found myself down at the Aardklop Festival last weekend. Aardklop is a celebration of serious Afrikanerness that takes over the centre of the seemingly enlightened city of Potchefstroom at this time each year. Why the festival is there, and what aard it is busy klopping, is anyone’s guess. What I was doing there was an even more mysterious question.
Elna Boesak, my fellow panelist on a topic called ”The Race Divide — is it Wider or Narrower Than Before?” did not hesitate to throw the question squarely into my lap on the eve of the great debate.
”How come you always agree to talk at these things?” she asked, her blue eyes boring into me over salad and quiche in the VIP tent. She was referring to the fact that the last time we had met was at that other great festival of Afrikanerness called the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunsfees (or KKK for short — a comforting acromym for dusky-skinned out-of-towners to be greeted with on arrival). I had been on the platform there earlier in the year — now here I was again. Never mind that she was also here again. Why was I there?
Well, I ask you. I was there because I had been invited to shoot my mouth off in a public forum and hopefully get my own foot stuck in it, just like she had. (On the platform the next day she threw the audience into an awed hush by saying: ”Well, there is no racial divide in my house.”)
Well, there’s a whole string of reasons why I was there. Chief among these is that, as a well brought-up lad, one feels that it is impolite to refuse when invited to speak. Surely it is some kind of honour?
Secondly, of course, the subject itself was intriguing. Who had thought up the question? Did they really expect a serious answer? If they did, we panelists (former Die Vaderland editor Harald Pakendorf was the third) were in a lot of trouble. Where did you start, and more importantly, where did you end? Who was going to stop us overheating on the subject and going on forever once we had got on a roll?
I looked Elna in the eye and gave her some sort of mashed-up mixture of all of the above in reply to her question. I added that it was always a revelation to find oneself in the middle of these exclusive tribal gatherings. It kind of gave you an insight into another world — one you wouldn’t normally even think you were missing. It told me a little more than I had known before (and a lot more than I would have cared to know, as it turned out) about the state of affairs in my native land, more than 10 years into our widely celebrated, non-racial democracy.
I must say that my heart was sinking even as I was trying to make this sound convincing to the immaculately coiffed and coutured Elna. It was sinking because, deep down inside, I was asking myself the same question: why had I come? What was the point? The lady who was to chair the proceedings had driven the knife in by describing the usual audience at these early morning talks as veering between glum, sullen and aggressive. They were also guaranteed to be wrinkled and set in their ways. Oh, and there was little doubt that they would be almost exclusively white and Afrikaans-speaking.
Since Elna, Harald and the chairing lady kept on forgetting themselves and chatting over my head in Afrikaans about stuff I had no clue about (”I feel a little like the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland,” I commented at one point, a biscuit with cheese on it stuck halfway to my mouth, but they all looked at me like I was a little strange — like Alice, in fact — and continued talking) I was already braced for being stuck on the wrong side of a cultural and linguistic divide.
That I can take — it would have been the same thing with a whole bunch of official and unofficial South African languages, after all. What was making my heart sink was the seeming futility of the question we were to debate when stepping back and looking at local conditions.
Has South Africa’s racial divide grown wider or narrower — presumably since 1994? Participants at Aardklop would howl you down if you suggested that the very existence of such a festival indicated a gap that had become more deeply marked since the trashing of official apartheid.
As a black person wandering through its packed festival streets, however, you feel not only lonely and isolated, you feel not only that you have somehow been stuck on the far side of a rapidly widening gulf — you feel positively threatened. A line of seven-foot beer-boeps with red faces, arms like tractor accessories, and legs like cooling stacks on a nuclear power station is, let me assure you, threatening. A bunch of these in the narrow confines of a gents’ toilet, their combined bulk standing between you and the exit, their eyes fixed on a point just above your head as if they hadn’t noticed you, is calculated to make you forget that you’ve just emptied your bowels and persuade your body to find a whole lot of other stuff to empty out of them all over again.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer — one Aardklop doesn’t represent a national profile. So they say.
But you can’t escape the way it gives you a chill down the back of your neck. What was I doing here, indeed? I could have stayed in the fools’ paradise of Johannesburg and pretended to myself that we are living in a lovely, ship-shape rainbow.
So, yes, I have to admit: as Elna nailed me with her innocent, blue-eyed question, my heart started sinking, because all of a sudden I was in the thick of a battle I had never intended to enlist in. And before I could even open my mouth, that battle had been won — and not by my side I might add.