Heartfruit by Ingrid Wolfaardt (Human & Rousseau, 2008)
This highly readable farm saga is set in the fruit farming area of the Western Cape and extends through three generations. It bears certain similarities to Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk in that the main protagonist, Isak Minaar, is confined to bed and it deals minutely with relationships on the farm, both between family members and between farmers and “volk”. The author clearly knows her oats when it comes to farming and she knows farming communities and politics as well.
Ingrid Wolfaardt says it took her a long time to finish. It certainly shows a labour of love in its careful execution, with some wonderfully drawn portraits. In that of Minaar the author explores in some detail what went into a boy’s education, or the making of a man, in the years after the Nationalists came into power.
A gang of young playmates on the farm included both white and coloured kids, but as they grew older things changed. Isak was sent off to boarding school where a talent for rugby protected him, but also began the process of hardening. This was continued in the army and by the time he came back to look after the farm he was as hardegat as anyone could be. This war experience haunts Isak for the rest of his life.
The background of local politics explores a mostly forgotten era. The farm has a tradition of humane treatment of its workers, and Isak’s parents were Bloedsappe, which is to say they voted for Jan Smuts. When the Nats came in and the agricultural marketing boards were established, as well as the co-ops, the Minaars were systematically victimised by petty agricultural bureaucrats until the farm’s prosperity declined.
Then after 1994 and the upheavals in the farming world, Isak goes to France to re-establish old marketing links there. He has a near-fatal accident and is suddenly entirely powerless. Women and the young politicised coloured people on the farm are ready to take up the reins, but it seems that it is his weakness that has permitted Isak to go along with this.
This novel reads well; Wolfaardt easily manages the transitions from Isak’s flashbacks to the hospital bed in France. As in Pauline Smith’s The Beadle we have an English novel that feels or reads like Afrikaans; it is an interesting experience, and a happy revival of the past as one can imagine that old Bloedsappe would be truly bilingual, to the extent that the languages were not really separated in the mind. There are many Afrikaans words left just as they are: “volk”, meaning coloured farm staff, and “Ouma’s skatlam”. Heartfruit itself is an Afrikaans way of combining two English words.