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

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Writing: the writing which reflects the concerns of a people no longer European,
not yet African. 3
In this sense the landscape on the cover of Krog’s book, a photograph by George
Hallet, can be interpreted using the vocabulary familiar to readers of white
writing, that literature of disembodied landscapes. It is a literature that fails, in
Coetzee’s words, to imagine a relationship with South Africa’s indigenous
inhabitants: ‘Official historiography long told a tale of how until the nineteenth
century of the Christian era the interior of what we now call South Africa was
unpeopled. The poetry of empty space may one day be accused of furthering
the same fiction’. 4 But in Antjie Krog’s work, I want to argue, this landscape
comes to represent something new and different in white writing, and perhaps -
more ambitiously – marks a change in white writing in the sense that Coetzee
defines it.
Krog’s country of her skull is a landscape from which she feels herself barred, as
a white South African, on account of her whiteness, on account of the name of
her father. It is a landscape familiar from her childhood, the landscape of the
fathers and the brothers; but she can never again enter it. And at the same time
it is a landscape into which she wishes to be invited by her fellow South Africans.
But the figure in the landscape is distinctly different from Coetzee’s lone figure
unable to imagine another presence. In Krog’s work, I argue in this paper, there
is a self-conscious desire to address an audience that includes black South
Africans. As I will show in this paper, the addressee of the text is not stable. At
times it seems clear that the text invokes as readers fellow-Afrikaners, those
whom Krog wishes to convince of our/their guilt and complicity in South Africa’s
injustices, as recorded by the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. At other times, the text is explicitly addressed to those whom Krog
invests with the power to allow her into the country of her imagination and heart. 5
The back flap of the Krog text shows a photograph of the author, superimposed
on the landscape, standing at a window, perhaps looking out, her hand touching
its own reflected image. The book, as is well known, is based on the reports
done for the South African Broadcasting Service, where Krog worked under the
name Antjie Samuel – her married name. The copyright of the book is in the
name of Antjie Samuel, the biographical note on the back describes Antjie Krog,
who it says reported ‘as Antjie Samuel’. This divided identity, this double
signature, is more than a case of a married woman making a choice to publish
3 J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (Johannesburg, Radix,
1988), p. 11.
4 Ibid., p. 177.
5 What remains outside the scope of this paper is the reception of Krog’s text by her readers.
This paper forms part of a larger book-length project, provisionally (and ironically) called Going
Native, in which I explore some of the ways in which white South African writing has imagined a
black interlocutor. In this work, too, the focus is not on the actual reception of the work by black
readers, but rather on the effects of imagining an addressee beyond what J M Coetzee might call
‘white reading.’