Long distance Afrikaners: Afrikaans literature and dislocated identity in a European context

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of (white) South Africans (many Afrikaans-speaking) left the country in search for a different and more stable political and economic situation abroad. This article focuses on the imagined expatriate identity expressed in three Afrikaans literary texts set in a European context. It examines Sabbatsreis by Annelie Botes, Dan Roodt’s Moltrein and 30 Nights in Amsterdam by Etienne van Heerden. By focusing on expatriate identities in these texts, it investigates how postcolonial Afrikaner subjectivity is formulated in a European context, and examines the representation of Afrikaners’ view of Europe. What does this Europe look like, and how does this Europe relate to the characters’ own Afrikaner identity? The “displaced” position of the protagonists enables a critical perspective on Europe, different interpretations of the South African situation, and various understandings of their own identity as postcolonial subjects.

Keywords:

• Afrikaner identity
• exile literature
• postcolonial Europe
• whiteness
• Annelie Botes
• Dan Roodt
• Etienne van Heerden

Notes

1. Compare this South African interpretation with a more general consideration of decolonization migration, such as the repatriation of retornados from Mozambique and Angola to Portugal, and the pied-noirs from Algeria to France given in the volume edited by Smith (2003).

2. According to the latest census information from 2011, the white population in South Africa constitutes about 8.9% or 4.5 million people of the population of nearly 52 million. The number of people speaking Afrikaans as a home language (first language) is estimated at about 6.8 million. The language is spoken by coloured, white and black South Africans as a home language (Statistics South Africa 2012).

3. This approach is a variation on a topic of a special edition of Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society (Bekers, Helff, and Merolla 2009) entitled “Transcultural Modernities”, on identity constructions of Africans in Europe. Here, however, the focus is explicitly on the self-perception of Afrikaners (white, Afrikaans-speaking South Africans) as represented in Afrikaans literature.

4. This political struggle received strong support from members of the Afrikaans Language Movement, who campaigned to have Afrikaans recognized as official language alongside the already existing official languages, Dutch and English.

5. A case in point is the categorization of the character Melanie Isaacs in Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Although her race is never mentioned explicitly, there are clues, following a particular racial “script”, that Melanie is – according to apartheid categorization – coloured. See Van der Vlies (2010, 25) for a discussion.

6. Translations from the original Afrikaans texts are my own, except for quotations from Van Heerden (2011), for which the English translation by Michiel Heyns was used.

7. In Xhosa, loan words from English generally fall into a noun class that adds the prefix i- to the loaned word. For a description of such loan integration processes, see Dowling (2011).

8. See Jansen (2011) for a discussion of other literary descriptions of the relationship between black “nannies” and their white children.

9. One of the themes in this novel is that of the historical clash between the British and the Boere, which resulted in the Anglo-Boer war at the start of the 20th century. Annelie refers in a number of places to this “Boer-English” conflict (e.g. 237).

10. Roodt is one of the founding figures of an Afrikaans culture lobby group, the Pro-Afrikaanse Aktie Groep (PRAAG). PRAAG has its own publishing house, which published Moltrein. For a discussion of Roodt’s Afrikaans activism, see Geertsema (2006).

11. Roodt refers here to the anti-apartheid movement in France and its strong position-taking against white South Africans. In the novel it is described as the French media’s “laughable shouting at the evil whites and Afrikaners” (2004, 10) and elsewhere he describes how the anti-apartheid movement’s “hatred” towards Afrikaners intended to “destroy the psyche of a small people, perhaps irrevocably destruct [it]” (182–183).

12. For example, a French communist with whom Anton has a short relationship refers to white South Africans as the “disgusting white tribe” (Roodt 2004, 33).

13. This attitude was strongly condemned by fellow writer Marlene van Niekerk. She rejects the elitist and racist ideological position-taking of authors such as Roodt, who create an image of the Afrikaner as someone “who has discarded the debt burden of the past in a [ … ] pissed off, self-pitying, defensive and attacking mood” (Van Niekerk 2008, 86).

14. A fifth member of the cell, Carl Wehmeyer, is killed by the other cell members. The “Sobukwe cell” and its members are in this novel a fictive construction. However, the cell’s name refers to the political activist Robert Sobukwe, who founded a political party called the Pan Africanist Congress.

15. Theo van Gogh was a provocative Dutch film-maker, who was killed violently by a young Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent in 2004.