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

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to write in Afrikaans is not a right but a privilege bought and paid for at a
price – and that it brings with it heavy responsibilities. 27
Of course this essay was written in Afrikaans, and is here translated by the
daughter in an act of treachery against exactly the sentiments expressed in her
mother’s essay. 28 The quotation from the mother is inserted here as part of an
argument for the necessity of betraying the language of the ancestors, Krog’s
use of it directly contradicting the logic and argument of the original. And in the
way that Krog uses it, she concludes that the farm will remain barred against reentry
by the daughter who has chosen not to use the language of the fathers;
and who has betrayed the legacy of the ancestors. In this move, Krog suggests
that white South Africans who identify beyond the bounds of their racial
classification, struggle to maintain a sense of history, having chosen not to
perpetuate the ‘route of the blood’.
One solution that seems to be investigated increasingly frequently by white South
African writers is to claim another kind of past from that which was celebrated by
the white or Afrikaner ancestors. In some writing by white South Africans, there
is a memory of a time before the white ancestors, a time when the white child
was cared for and parented by a good black mother – and in my argument here I
want to make clear that I think this is a highly problematic solution. In Afrikaans
playwright Reza de Wet’s works there is a strong sense of what she calls a
healing African spirituality, often embodied in a black woman. 29 De Wet says in
an interview: ‘The black woman is for me representative of unconditional loving
[and she uses this term in English, while the rest of the interview is conducted in
Afrikaans] and a nurturing source. But she also represents for me all that we
have betrayed and repressed, and that which could have had such a positive,
saving influence’. 30 One could write an entire paper on this quote, but I want to
point out only the fact of the totalising singular form, and the use of ‘we’, a ‘we’ I
shall come back to in the concluding remarks of this paper.
Another example of this trend, in which white South African writers talk of the
abandonment of their blood lineage in favour of a newly acquired ‘African’ family
can be found in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, about which I have written more
completely elsewhere. 31 The narrative is filled with yearning for recognition by
another mother, another lineage. Malan quotes Breyten Breytenbach saying that
we (again this unproblematised ‘we’ - white South Africans) must give ourselves
27 Ibid., p. 98
28 The 1970 poem “Ma” ends with the words: “ek is so jammer mamma/ dat ek nie is/ wat ek
graag vir jou wil wees nie” (I am so sorry, mummy, that I am not that which I so long to be for
you”).
29 R. de Wet, Diepe Grond (Pretoria, HAUM, 1986).
30 R. de Wet. Interviewed by Riaan de Villiers, Die Suid-Afrikaan 10, Autumn 1987.
31 C. Coetzee, ‘Going Native: Rian Malan's Dream of a Dark Heart’ (unpublished paper, Cape
Town, 1998).