It’s a truism that the best kind of autobiography isn’t just about a person, but also a window into a culture and people, albeit a window with a very particular view. Steve Hofmeyr’s autobiography, written as part (premature) deathbed confessional, part eulogy of rebirth, is enormously satisfying to his fans, but it’s much more than that. It’s rich material for anyone trying to understand a certain kind of South Africa.
A man like Hofmeyr is particularly suited to grappling with issues of identity. Primarily, this is because, as this book describes, Steve Hofmeyr the public figure is largely a construct of happenstance and commercial imperative, and as with all such cultural memes, at the mercy of whoever chooses to translate it for their own ends.
But also, there’s the strange fact that, for some reason, people habitually misspell his name. Pictures of his various awards, for example, show that many are attributed to Steve ”Hofmeyer”. It’s a curious thing, and in its way a trenchant comment on the media and music industries.
If you can’t even spell the name of the celebrity you’re creating, well, then you’re an idiot. And much of Hofmeyr’s book traces the evolution, or rather devolution, of local media’s culture of the celebrity knockdown. In the last 10 years or so, Afrikaner celebrities have been given much less respect than was their wont, for reasons varying from desperation at dropping print circulation and diasporal readers, to a relatively newfound freedom to criticise figures who no longer wield the absolute power they once had in the cultural economy.
Mense van My Asem traces this downward spiral, but what makes it more than just fascinating is the way the personal life of Hofmeyr is irretrievably interwoven with the aspects of the political life of South Africa. Hofmeyr’s definition of himself, as ”in die middel met louwarm opgewondenheid oor die pole wat mekaar met ideologieë bestook het”, usefully describes a type of neutral political standpoint that, in the last decade, has strayed regrettably towards the right.
Hofmeyr’s book documents potential reasons for this shift in some white Afrikaners, and indeed many other South Africans. It’s a litany of perceived insults and abortive rebellions, best summed up by Hofmeyr’s inclusion of a Fred Khumalo epigram: ”Should the winners rewrite history uncontested?”