Of course I knew it was a hoax. The phone rang and I made the mistake of answering it. It asked, in halting, Spanish-accented tones, if I spoke Afrikaans. That’s when I knew it was a hoax.
‘I have a story to tell,” she continued, in English, after I had assured her that I did not speak a word of Afrikaans. ‘I come from Argentina. I am a third generation of the Boers who came to Argentina during the Boer War. I am an Argentinian Boer. I have been in South Africa for four years, and I have been having some problems.”
My hair was standing on end. Why me?
She explained: ‘I read about you in a magazine. You seemed like the kind of person I could talk to.”
So we made a blind date. Agreed to talk.
Of course I was intrigued. Those Boers living on the edge of the South Atlantic, a thousand kilometres away from their native (read my lips) South Africa, sitting on the southern-most tip of Spanish occupied Argentina, all trace of Indian civilisation carefully erased, which I had first read about in a slim volume written by the late Bruce Chatwin called In Patagonia. I never believed I would ever encounter such Boers — certainly not live in South Africa.
But here she was. It continued to feel like a hoax because I had a funny feeling I should recognise the cellphone number she was calling from. But above all, the closer we got to the date when we were supposed to meet, the more unlikely it seemed that this could really be real. I had asked her over the phone, ‘What’s your surname?” ‘Kruger,” she replied, ‘related to the late Paul Kruger.”
Yeah, right.
The only thing that kept me sticking to the forthcoming meeting a few days later was that Chatwin’s history had led me to believe that the whole story of an entire Boer community transplanted to Patagonia was actually true.
The story, as I understood it, was that the then Argentinian government (full of fascists, no doubt), on hearing about a heroic community of white people in darkest Africa threatened with annihilation during the 1899 to 1902 Anglo-Boer War (not by the Zulus, for once, but by the British, traditional enemies of all-patriotic Argentinians) had sent agents over to invite the more daring among them to come over and establish farmlands in the manner to which they were best accustomed in free and easy, recently tamed Argentina.
What they didn’t tell the Boer families who swallowed the bait was that Patagonia, right down almost against the South Pole, was the most unattractive and difficult to manage part of the whole colonial enterprise that they were supposed to become part of — Indians and Zulus notwithstanding.
Vera Kruger, when I met her, confirmed most of the above. Her grandparents had dutifully travelled across the South Atlantic, attracted by promises of a future free of British, Zulus and Indians, and settled down in exclusively Boer communities on allocated farms to do with as they would.
For the three generations that followed (and they haven’t stopped reproducing, let me assure you), they lived in exclusively Afrikaans-speaking communities, looking down on their (very distant) neighbours as inferior beings.
Vera Kruger was six or seven years old before she even had contact with the colonial Spanish language that was generally spoken across the whole continent of which they were now a part. Spanish came as a shock when she was finally, reluctantly, largely of her own volition, introduced to the educational system. This was after she overcame her inbred fear of Catholics, and foreigners generally, and gingerly entered a convent, attracted by another world that she could scarcely put her finger on.
A new world. A new identity. She was gradually beginning to hate the closed, inward-looking, superior community she had been born into. Her children were born, and could not be thrust into the same confining box she had grown up in. Her grandmother, one of those original immigrants from post-Boer War South Africa, actually had a problem with the fact that Kruger’s second daughter, whose father was of Italian origin, had skin that was suspiciously dark — ‘something like what you call coloured here,” she tells me.
So what’s it all about? ‘Love,” she tells me. ‘It dawned on me that I come from a people who can’t love.” Her grandmother could not unconditionally love her daughter. In her own life, lack of love had led to unfathomable consequences.
Wow. Why me?
She came to South Africa four years ago by chance — because some high-profile Boers happened to be on a tour of South America, heard of her heritage, and told her that she had an automatic right of return. The Argentinian economy had collapsed, and so had her second marriage. She made the trek back across the South Atlantic.
And that’s what it’s all about. In spite of her personal success, her sheer human survival, her return to her supposed cultural roots, she is isolated. Afrikaans, the bosom of her mother tongue, is a cultural weapon that tastes like poison.
Repeatedly she goes back to this theme of love. ‘I come from a people who don’t know how to love. It reminds me that I grew up among a people who don’t know how to love. My grandmother. My father. It troubles me.”
It’s an explosive package to have landed in your lap under any circumstances. In our Nation of the Unchallenged Rainbow, it smacks of unfinished business that few care to explore.