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Performing Whitely in the Postcolony
Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life
By Megan Lewis University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-448-7
CHAPTER 1
Laagers of Whiteness
AFRIKANER ASCENDENCY AND THE STAGING OF A NATION
To open this study, I trace how Afrikaners leveraged performance tactics and media to stage themselves into a cohesive nation, or volk, during the Afrikaner ascendency in the first decades of the twentieth century. I explore several questions: How did Afrikaners become a volk in the first place? How did the divinely sanctioned ethnomythology at the core of the apartheid state develop? How did they perform themselves into power? And in what manners did they leverage theatrics to engender and reinforce their identity as a volk? First, I map the ethnomythology of the nascent Afrikaner nation in the early years of the twentieth century. Next, I establish the laager as an organizing principle for Afrikaner identity, teasing out what the concept makes possible and what it impedes, and theorizing the intersections between race and nation. To illustrate the laager's imaginative hold on Afrikaner culture, I analyze its earliest film representation: De Voortrekkers (1916). Then I focus on the large-scale nationalistic pageantry of the 1938 centenary commemoration of the Great Trek and the films Bou van 'n nasie (1938) and 'n Nasie hou koers (1940). And finally, I explore the performative nature of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.
AFRIKANER NATION-BUILDING ROUTES
Afrikaner identity is a rooted construction that often denies its own routes. Like its intimate bedfellow, whiteness, Afrikanerdom required that its constructedness remain invisible in order for the system to maintain its power. Isabel Hofmeyr argues that class formation in the early twentieth century among white Afrikaans-speakers became hitched to notions of ethnic identity (Afrikanerdom) which were disseminated through performative mechanisms, the most central of which was language. She traces the "invention" of Afrikaner nationalism to the years between 1902 and 1924, illuminating a series of inventive acts by which an educated elite socialized a population of poor disenfranchised Afrikaans-speakers from both rural and urban spaces into a "working class" (Hofmeyr 1987, 115). A secondary desire in this socialization process was to "make Afrikaans respectable" (Hofmeyr 1987, 104), and with this notion came moral and racial coding that would form the foundation of the Afrikaner nationalist project, the complex machinery that would secure the National Party political victory in 1948. This triumph inaugurated the apartheid state and placed Afrikaners in power at the expense of all others.
Afrikaner history is a singular narrative amid many competing claims to South Africa. Despite apartheid-era history books that claimed otherwise, the Dutch settlers who colonized the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century did not arrive into uninhabited territory; African space was already territorialized and not a blank slate. Nor did the settlers remain untouched by the African habitus; their social, political, personal, and sexual interactions with black and brown Africans influenced their language, their politics, and their everyday lives. As the original uitlanders (foreigners, literally "those from outside the land"), they imposed themselves upon African space but were also impacted by it. Ever conscious of the precariousness of their existence as European settlers in black Africa, or as colonials in conflict with other colonials (the British), the Dutch settlers performed themselves into and onto the space.
Homi Bhabha has articulated the role of marginalized populations within the nation. He asserts that the margins disarticulate the nation and then rearticulate it; the margins address and thereby re-form the center (1990, 320–322). The iteratively performed Afrikaner script emphasized a divinely sanctioned history that justified their colonization of South Africa and reinforced their marginalization and oppression by British imperialism. It was from this position of marginalization that Afrikaners were able to articulate their own kind of center in the form of apartheid, which itself became the center until the 1990s, when another marginalized group (the nonwhite majority of the population) disarticulated that nation and articulated a new South African landscape once again.
For Benedict Anderson, the appeal of nationalism lies in its religious quality, its ability to comfort its constituents in the face of suffering and death (1991, 10–11). With its messianic rhetoric, extreme claims of racial and ethnic purity, and fervent performance of belonging, the Afrikaner nationalist project skillfully manipulated this sacralized dimension of nationhood. A common refrain was the notion of Afrikaners being God's Chosen People, driven by a colonial myth akin to Manifest Destiny, to tame and colonize "savage black Africa" as the bearers of "white European civilization." As with any colonial encounter, the reterritorialization of indigenous space by European settler-invaders was physically and symbolically violent. Internal conflicts existed between indigenous populations, and thus the space into which white settlers inserted their own scripts was already contested. For European settlers in the seventeenth century, exposure to tropical diseases and parasites, the rugged terrain and scorching sun, and indigenous peoples defending their territories, had to have been (in reality or perception) highly dramatic. Travelogues and accounts of Africa by missionaries, explorers, and settlers often reveal that they struggled to reconcile the exotic with the familiar. Entering the space of the Other, the European Self was forced to recognize its own historicity (De Certeau 1988), and when that self failed to make a neat match between the known and unknown, these accounts either wrote over the indigenous or shaped it to conform to a European lens. Such perceptive acts on the part of European Self produced an internal anxiety that in turn was articulated outward — back at the African Other — as violence, mistrust, and misunderstanding.
THE INVENTION OF AFRIKANER TRADITION
The Afrikaner volk is largely a product of the nation-building project that began in the 1870s and culminated in 1948 with the victory of D. F. Malan's Herenigde Nasionale Party (Reunited National Party). In the wake of the devastation of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (the Fellowship of True Afrikaners) set about codifying the Boers' common cultural capital under the name of "Afrikaner." This nationalist project drew on events of the previous century — especially the Great Trek of the 1830s and its romanticized pioneer life — in writing a particularly Afrikaner history of South Africa.
Prior to 1994, official histories maintained that "Afrikaners" existed as a cohesive entity since they first landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652; in reality, the term Afrikaner only came into use much later. The first time that a white (European, Caucasian) person claimed a word hitherto used to describe locally born slaves, free blacks, and the Khoikhoi was in March 1707, when a seventeen-year-old Dutch settler named Hendrik Biebouw, who was born in the Cape, shouted at the local landdros (chief magistrate), "Ek ben een Africaander" (Giliomee and Mbenga 2007). Claiming "I am from Africa," Biebouw articulated his status as a native-born settler, distinguishing himself from European-born settlers. Afrikaners' sense of belonging to/in Africa is thus manifested in their name. The word made its way gradually into its current usage as the population of mainly Dutch settlers expanded its physical presence at the tip of Africa and developed a psychological and ideological presence.
Since Jan van Riebeeck's settlement of the Cape of Good Hope on behalf of the Dutch East India Company in 1652, Afrikaners have been negotiating their identity as European settlers on African soil. The words used by others to describe these colonial Europeans and by members of the volk to self-identify have shifted over time. A brief mapping of these shifts is helpful: At first, Dutch settlers colonized the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and were joined by French Protestant refugees known as Huguenots in 1688. These settlers self-identified as burghers, or citizens, and were distinct from, and superior to various black tribes, the San, and the Khoikhoi. After the British, whom Afrikaners refer to as rooineke (rednecks) or khakis (for the color of their military uniforms), took over the Cape in 1795, the Dutch settlers moved eastward to maintain their independence. Trekboere (nomadic farmers) eventually moved into the hinterland in the 1830s in a mass exodus known as the Great Trek in order to establish separate independent states. A loosely organized group of Afrikaans-speakers known as Boers (boere, or "farmers") fought two major wars against the British: the Transvaal War (also known as the First War of Freedom, 1880–1881), which gained the Transvaal Boers self-governance; and the Anglo-Boer War or Second War of Freedom (1899–1902), which led to the Union of South Africa in 1910 and marked the consolidation of British hegemony and Boer defeat.
Drawing on the First and Second Language Movements of the late nineteenth century and the nation-building project of the early twentieth, in 1948 Afrikaner nationalists formed a repressive and well-oiled political machine known as apartheid (separateness). Apartheid lasted until 1994, when Nelson Mandela, the white nation's most feared "terrorist," became the celebrated first black president of the new democratic, pluralist republic. As these various naming practices suggest, Afrikaner identity has always been a state of becoming. This ever-evolving population continues to reinvent and reimagine itself after 1994 in the new democracy.
The Boers were, until the 1930s, loosely defined groups of urban intellectuals and rural farming communities, as well as British sympathizers and religious groups of varying affiliations and degrees of fervor. They were far more heterogeneous than monolithic. Their history had not yet been codified. They had no clear political unity, nor did they organize themselves as a unified cultural or ethnic group. Instead, they were among the competing forces (including African nationalists and laborers, British royalists and business interests, and Calvinist religious leaders) all vying for access and power. Prior to 1876, "Afrikaans" did not exist as a language; rather, it was a dialect spoken predominantly by coloureds and called kombuistaal (kitchen language).
The first signs of Boer mobilization, of deliberate attempts to unify the population, came decades after the Great Trek, in 1875, when Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners began gathering information for the express purpose of defining their volk. The task of unifying Afrikaans-speakers into a coherent political group was not easy. The breakup of the fabric of rural Boer families by industrialism, the declining role of religion, poverty, and disempowerment under British rule, all undermined the unity sought by the Fellowship. Therefore, a conscientious effort was made to create a united volk identity. In this process, cultural ideals were marketed as specifically "Afrikaans." Through the practice of Andersonian print capitalism, using newspapers, pamphlets, and literature to define and articulate a national identity, the idea of Afrikaner volkseie became standardized and disseminated. By the turn of the twentieth century, coffeehouses, reading circles, and drama societies were popular venues for the circulation of Afrikaner literature, cultural values, and ideology. These forms of media inspired pride and a sense of belonging in their audiences. The cultural capital of what it meant to be an Afrikaner — which was now distinctly marked as European in origin, white, male, "civilized," and Calvinist — gained value and was welcomed by an eager market now self-identified as members of this "nation." Thus what Doris Sommer would term a "foundational fiction" was circulated, reinscribing "for each future citizen the (natural and irresistible) foundational desires for/of the government [that would be in] power" (1991, 31).
A LAAGERED NATION
The Dutch and French Huguenot settlers' desire to seek comfort in the face of Africa's unfamiliarity took its particular form in the drive toward their nationalist identity. The principal metaphor of the Afrikaner volk became the laager, a purportedly impregnable, protective fortress of encircled wagons (figure 1). Circling the wagons was a historic practice on the frontier but is also a philosophical and ideological blueprint for how Afrikaners write — and perform — their own etiological myths; it is the symbolic image to which they return repeatedly. Principally designed for protection, the laager kept out undesirables (wild animals, enemy forces, black Africa). Simultaneously, the circle of wagons was a site of containment, a literal and figurative hearth around which families gathered to cook, eat, pray, communicate, sleep, and guard desirables (particularly white women). The laager served as a temporary home while on trek and once the Boer Republics were formed in the 1840s, the homestead replaced it as the site of belonging. In Afrikaner ethnomythology, the farm (plaas) is an extension of the frontier laager. "Located on the imaginary frontier, even if in fact in the midst of settlement," Loren Kruger suggests, "the family farm marks the colonial penetration of the hinterland and dispossession of the Africans, even as it claims to represent the natural rights of the Afrikaner" (1999b, 32). And during the Afrikaner ascendancy, the laager became a metaphoric anchor used to galvanize a communal volk around a national identity.
However, the laager is a Janus-faced metaphor. Imagined as impenetrable, self-contained, and exclusive, not unlike the logic of the Afrikaner nationalist project — or the system of whiteness, for that matter — the laager has two main zones of activity: the central core and the spaces in between. The physical space created within the wagon circle, around the central fire pit, is the safety zone, the space of daily domestic interaction (and thus the sphere of women) and nightly male vigilance. But the space between the wagons, the penetrable and porous interstices, close to the sleeping bodies of women and children inside the wagons (protected only by thorny branches and male vigilance), is a site of potential transgressions, unspoken crossings, and external threats. Thus, because the laager cannot ever be hermetically sealed, it is a fatal strategy; it is more porous and more tenuous than it is monolithic. Like whiteness, the laager must maintain a belief in its infallibility to remain intact and powerful and, like whiteness, it becomes vulnerable to anxiety when its porousness is revealed.
When contemporary news reports talk of white Africans circling their wagons against the blackness of Africa, they are drawing on the concept of the laager imprinted into the psyches of Afrikaners since the beginning of their organized nationhood. Scholarship on Afrikaner culture, politics, and psychology evidences how they have organized themselves into social, economic, and political laagers that exclude others and are vehemently protected in the name of the volk. For June Goodwin and Ben Schiff, for example, Afrikaners are exclusive members of a closed society, "reluctant to deviate from the official line, monolithic in their views, xenophobic, paranoid, narcissistic" (1995, 14). For Kruger, Afrikaners are committed to a "nationalist resistance to British hegemony, marked by linguistic exclusivity, the mythology of autochthony, and a chauvinist attitude to other, even more marginalized groups, whether indigenous or immigrant" (1999b, n37). For Johannesburg Sunday Times editor Ken Owen, the "perpetual insecur[ity]" of Afrikaners, the "children of an open frontier" (1996b), lends itself to the protective metaphor of the laager, a maternal enclosure that safeguards them and maintains them in a perpetual state of psychological dependency on the enclosure. Christina Landman terms it a "fantasy of innocence" whereby Afrikaners deify their heroic frontier adventures while simultaneously "ignoring the past and their culpability in and for it" (Daley 1998, 11).
Apartheid was the laager made manifest. A small minority of whites — comprising only 10 percent of the population and including WESSAs, as well as Afrikaners — reigned over the black majority for five decades. Nestled safely within the laager of privilege, in big houses with expansive lawns and swimming pools, whites could turn a blind eye to the poverty, dehumanization, and violence perpetrated on the bodies of black South Africans in the neighboring townships. White South Africans enjoyed (and still do) one of the highest standards of living in the world; however, there was an ugly price to be paid for the wealth, security, and privilege that the white laager offered. The apartheid state was designed to benefit whites within the laager of privilege and discriminate against the majority of the population outside it. This insider/outsider topology defined — and was reproduced by — the political, legal, and economic machine of apartheid.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Performing Whitely in the Postcolony by Megan Lewis. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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