October 14, 2008
it's hard out there for an Afrikaner
I had a farm in Africa. Or rather, my mother’s family, the Bothas, had it from the 1940s until the 1990s, and it was the wrong type of farm: not Blixen’s bucolic liberal ideal, but an unprofitable, insular dustpan in the Afrikaner heartland of South Africa’s old Transvaal, near Rysmierbult (Termite Hill). If the adjacent districts of Krugersdorp and Roodepoort were the Afrikaner Bible Belt, then Rysmierbult could be called the buckle – the men on the farm were always loosening theirs to piss outside. This was Boer territory, where the men were manne and the women were supposed to produce children for the manne, and koeksusters for the church bazaar. In fact, though, my grandfather, Oupa Frikkie Botha, was not really a farmer at all, but a schoolteacher of Latin and maths with a dangerous fondness for Virgil. Hence the farm. And, as it turned out, he couldn’t do the maths. In spite of generous government subsidies, the mielies didn’t multiply. The sheep didn’t fatten. The peaches rotted. The dream of rural self-sufficiency failed.
more from Granta here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:29 AM | Permalink
Comments
I also grew up as an Afrikaner girl in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. No priviledged ancestry like family farms even though in this region since 1659. Farmed in truly rural area where no 'mielies' would ever grow. Thus were poor and could not have friends every day since the nearest adjacent farms were more than 10 km away. I thus grew up amongst coloured children of workers who often migrated through the region looking for any work they could get. We could only speak Afrikaans, and I taught several such friends elementary writing because they did not go to school. I can speak English fluently, mostly learnt from a schoolmate whose father was also previously in England in the diplomatic service, and a teacher who also immigrated and did not want to learn any Afrikaans. Due to a hearing problem I have a funny but non-Afrikaans English accent, that impress many of my English clients as quite good. Still it is not my first language, and 'belongs' to a nation who rudely killed a large proportion of our nation a century ago, sometimes using coloured people because they themselves could not fight in the way the Afrikaner even taught his migrant workers. And that because we discovered diamonds and gold instead of them! Still I want to speak the language for the sake of those early friends who never had the priviledge that I had to be put in a boarding school since the age of 6, away from my parents about whom I could not stop to cry for more than 12 years. I paid every cent of my university studies out of my own pocket afterwards, and bought my first own car 10 years after school because I could never expect it from my parents. No governmental or religious priviledges! I have inhereted their intelligence and traits, including a strong independence and sense of integrity, but it is worthless to the rest of the world if you still want to be called an Afrikaner because of heritage rather than only language or the way of earning an income. We are in need of Afrikaner writers that can indeed write from the heart about the Afrikaner, without language or other political and racial prejudices. That cannot easily be accomplished without living as decent human beings and Afrikaners whom I have learnt to be very humble and caring people when I grew up; and who would never allow idiologies to change them into the monsters that they are mostly portrayed to be. Shame on all those who cannot be proud of their own past, or who want to 'clean' their own heritage or failures by degrading a whole nation rather than the individuals who were responsible for specific inhumane acts!
Posted by: Antoinette Brandt | Oct 14, 2008 4:39:33 PM
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