1 They Never Wept, the Men of my Race: Antjie Krog's Country of my ...

10
Congress. 37 In his book, Verwoerd documents his own move from being what he
describes as a son of Verwoerd to being a ‘son of Mandela’. Each of the
chapters bears a title that follows the same pattern – ‘from… to’. The English
language edition includes a foreword by Nelson Mandela, whose signature at the
end of his letter in support of the book is reproduced – as a seal of the author’s
association with him. The book includes a photograph showing the author
meeting the President. Near the end of the book Verwoerd reports a fight
between his infant children and some friends: each one wants to be Mandela in
the game they are playing. In the way Verwoerd presents his relationship to
Nelson Mandela, it is as if the next generation have made their entry into the new
world, where the name of the father is Mandela not Verwoerd.
Yet Verwoerd’s decision to vote for the ANC, and his wife’s election as an ANC
Member of Parliament, is never dissociated from the name Verwoerd. Melanie
Verwoerd belongs to a generation of women who need not take on the name of
the husband, or the husband’s father; yet for both of these young Afrikaners their
choices take on added power, acting as they do against the backdrop of the
Afrikaner genealogy. Metaphors of new beginnings and birth abound in Wilhelm
Verwoerd’s text, which reads in many ways like a conventional religious
conversion narrative. The old life is left behind, the development of the new life
is charted, and there is a dramatic break between the old and the new. In the
conversion narrative, the past is not revisited fondly; for the children of Verwoerd
the past also remains a country to which there is no return.
Antjie Krog’s text speaks of this rebirth in more complex ways. Her text exhibits
a high degree of self-doubt and an acute awareness that a new identity for white
South Africans may only be possible, provisionally, at certain moments. She
writes:
In the beginning it was seeing. Seeing for ages, filling the head with ash.
No air. No tendril. Now to seeing, speaking is added and the eye plunges
into the mouth. Present at the birth of this country’s language itself.
And it wipes us out. Like a fire. 38
Significant in this section of her book is the sense of a new beginning, linked to
witnessing and testifying: first sight, then speech develops. And this
development that is tracked is that of ‘this country’s language itself’. The
language of this country – a language that articulates what has been seen, and
names the Afrikaner violators, she writes, ‘wipes us out’. This wiping out can be
understood in a number of ways; the reading that seems to be supported by the
rest of the text would be that the ‘we’ being wiped out here is an Afrikaner identity
that is able any longer to contain the author. Her past, her alliance, her
37 Verwoerd, My Winds of Change, p. 3.
38 Krog, Country of my Skull, p. 29.