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Afrikaans Literature in the Service of Ethnic Politics?

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Afrikaans Literature in the Service of Ethnic Politics? AMPlE COETZEE Afrikaans Literature in the Service of Ethnic Politics? The implication of the title of this paper might be disturbing to some. Had I believed it, one might suspect me of having the same opinion of Afrikaans literature as Zeke Mphahlele articulated years ago - "Were it not that Afrikaans literature glorifies white supremacy, and were it not for the unutterable evil this literature breathes, one would simply dismiss it as inane, a crushing bore." - but convincingly repudiated by a more knowledgeable G.J. Gerwel in his Literatuur en Apartheid. 1 I would, however, like to question the construct" Afrikaner," and I would show another side of this "minority literature," of a literature in which there are clear "statements" - in the Foucauldian sense of statement as an atom of a discursive formation2 - where a disruption of Afrikaner hegemony is, directly or implicitly, articulated. There are many writers and texts that come to mind, but for the purpose of this paper I am thinking of the deconstructivist, surrealist and often anarchic writing of Breyten Breytenbach; the systematic dissipation of the concept "Afrikaner" throughout the work of Andre P. Brink; the reversion of history and its reframing in the "national" sport of rugby in the work of John Miles; the struggle against the phallocentric and phallogocentric in the poetry of Antjie Krog; the death of the father in the work of Welma Odendaal; the consistent 1 G.J. Gerwel: Literatuur en apartheid. (Bellville, 1983), p. 1. Gerwel quotes Mphalhele as well as referring to similar sentiments expressed in Mphalhele's The African Image. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 107. 2 The concept of the "statement" is defined, its enunciative function given as well as a description of statements made, in Part Ill, "The Statement and the Archive," in The ArcheologyofKnawledge. (London: Tavistock, 1972), pp. 79-117. Afrikaans: Recollection, Redefinition, Remtution. Papers held at the 7th Conference on SouthAfrican Literature, BadBoU, September 25-27, 1992, eds. ROOertKriger & Etbel Kriger. [Mata1u 15-16). (AmsteIdam, AtIanIa: Editions Rodopi, 1996). 104 AMPlE COETZEE deconstruction of the word - and the ecriture - of the father in the work of Koos Prinsloo. This has been happening since the eighties, but people have not really been aware of it, because none of the work of these writers is being read seriously either at school level or at university level. So a situation has arisen where, when one talks of Afrikaans literature, one is talking about literature written in Afrikaans - but not the literature of the Afrikaner. He has no literature. And even though these Afrikaans writers may be honoured with prizes from the establish­ ment, this does not mean that their work is necessarily read, except by the - mostly literary - judges appointed by the prize givers, and the appointment of judges itself is .often an interesting ideological manoeuvre. Literature has moved ahead of Afrikaans-speakers, and is inscribing the breaking-up of the " Afrikaner" construct as has been accepted until recently. Afrikaans literature, which has given the language its raison d'etre - apart from the people who speak it - has gone beyond its necessary audience. And what is today written within the canon "Afrikaans literature" has little to do with the construct "Afrikaner. " Of course the canon is Western and from the Colonial Tradition, and the white Afrikaans writer has been privileged, safeguarded and nurtured - even though he/she might have written against the Hegemony - because of her/his bourgeois status in the apartheid state. But how does that differ from the bourgeois producers of the canon, the invention "literature" throughout the world? And despite the fact that the modem writer in Afrikaans, ie. the white writer, has been part of the hegemony against his or her conscious will, the silent, non-hegemonic voices have been the dialectical creative urge of their work. But the modem Afrikaans writer - that means initially in poetry since the 1930s - has not stood in the service of ethnic politics. It has been recorded within Afrikanef3 historiography that, in March 1707, a certain Hendrik Bibault, when arrested for 3 I shall have to make an attempt at qualifying this concept/construct, as a person of European (also East-European) descent who settled in South Africa, speaks Afrikaans, is .
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