/ 1 April 2007

De la Rey: Afrikaner absolution

The view of most commentators is that the De la Rey song is a call to mobilise Afrikaners against black people in general and the government in particular. High-powered editors, columnists, radio and television hosts read the lyrics as ”right-wing exclusivity” and a ”whining for lost power”. A government minister yawned and warned. A foreign correspondent’s right-wing interpretation was rewarded with an international front-page story.

Were the squeals of suppressed excitement at words like ”uprising”, ”rebellion” and ”warning” just my imagination? As if to say: Wow, the Afrikaners are at it again! As if Afrikaners really matter that much. As if Afrikaners could rise up and effectively bring back the past.

Is it that some South Africans miss the ”good” bad old days of the struggle, when the Afrikaners helped everybody else to determine what was right and what was wrong? Do some South Africans need the notion of ”bad racist Afrikaners on the rise” to bring to the fore the best in themselves in a country where right and wrong has become more ambiguous? Is there a need for ”us” to be bad, so that ”they” can be good?

Some 180 000 copies were bought within six months, but one has to distinguish between, on the one hand, hijacking by a rightwing fringe, and other buyers who experience the lyrics in the full context of the CD.

The CD as such makes no reference whatsoever to problems with or grudges against the new South Africa. It opens with De la Rey and closes with Brian Habana. The young people in the songs no longer drink brandy and Coke, but Bob Marleys at Cool Runnings. Nelson Mandela participates in a song talking about the rainbow nation ”and my favourite singer Bok van Blerk”.

The writers of these lyrics are clearly at peace with the new South Africa. It’s not the ”now” that bothers them, nor the Anglo-Boer War as the only honourable part of Afrikaner history, but the most recent apartheid past.

De la Rey, known for reconciliation efforts, is an honourable ancestor who mediates a space for Afrikaners between a preferred present and an dishonourable past. There is a forefather in the songs, a grandfather, male friends, Mandela and Habana, but no father. Why?

The Anglo Boer-War and the democratic dispensation is on the CD, but no apartheid past. Why?

According to Yael Danieli, coiner of the famous phrase ”a conspiracy of silence”, obvious silence after trauma indicates efforts to deal with shame and guilt. In her book on transgenerational trauma, Danieli says: ”Silence is profoundly destructive, for it attests to the person’s, family’s, society’s, community’s and nation’s inability to integrate trauma. They can find no words to narrate the trauma story and create a meaningful dialogue around it.”

If trauma is defined as ”a non ordinary human experience”, then one can safely say that since 1994 the Afrikaner in general has been confronted by parts of himself or herself that are ”not ordinary”. This causes problems in forming a sense of self that could coherently integrate the Anglo-Boer war past, the apartheid past and the new South Africa present.

A song on the CD about the Afrikaans language asks: in the new way that we are building our language, do you think I can go with pride now to where Afrikaners stand? The song about the grandfather puts it more blatantly: ”He [my grandfather] doesn’t need to say it, because it is in his eyes: a pride that makes me ashamed, a pride from above.” The lyrics are torn between loving the grandfather, while dealing with the fact that he belonged to and is still defending the Broederbond.

These contradictory feelings of love on the one hand and rejection of what the beloved did on the other, cause havoc in the formation of young identities, says Gertrud Hardtmann in her study on the children of Nazis. ”Children … developed, in place of their parents, feelings of guilt and shame.”

Studies directed at groups of Dutch collaborators who, after World War II, found themselves on the ”wrong” side of the war, indicated that although they wanted to uphold and celebrate the ”right” side after the war, they felt excluded. They felt ”depressed to live in a country … in which they are afraid to speak about their background … To be silent about your background means to be silent about the war. To be silent about one of the most important and most emotional topics in Dutch memory means not to belong.”

How can the apartheid past, with its Afrikaans coinage of injustice, ever be reconciled with the present? The song’s popularity says to me that, in general, Afrikaners want to become part of building a free country, but feel sidelined because of their past. They are trying to build a meaningful relationship with the rest of the country, but battle to deal with unexpressed guilt.

This is compunded by many white people who would like the Afrikaner to stay the ”guilty” party.

To ”obtain liberation” from a past, children often try to develop the identity they long for by relying on surrogate mothers and fathers. As mediator, De la Rey brings a third option about. He becomes the surrogate father, not to lead to uprising, but to assist children to deal with their guilt in such a way that they can successfully integrate their past into a new society.

Antjie Krog is a writer. This article is based on a paper she delivered at the Universities of the Western Cape and Stellenbosch