Adriaan Steyn A new a new for South laager Africa A new laager for a new South Africa Afrikaans film and the imagined boundaries of Afrikanerdom Adriaan Steyn A new laager for a new South Africa 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 1 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 2 A new laager for a new South Africa: Afrikaans film and the imagined boundaries of Afrikanerdom Adriaan Steyn African Studies Centre Leiden African Studies Collection, vol. 73 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 3 [Colophon] African Studies Centre Leiden P.O. Box 9555 2300 RB Leiden The Netherlands [email protected] www.ascleiden.nl Cover design: Heike Slingerland Cover photo: Adriaan Steyn Copyright photos: Author has made all reasonable efforts to trace the rightsholders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful, the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters Printed by Ipskamp Printing, Enschede ISSN: 1876-018x ISBN: 978-90-5448-175-1 © Adriaan Steyn, 2019 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 4 Table of contents Acknowledgements 7 1 Introduction 9 Approaching film 11 The imagined boundaries of Afrikanerdom 12 Chapter outline 26 2 The Afrikaans culture industry after apartheid 29 A language, a home 30 Afrikaans, Inc. 36 Imagined communities, produced communities 43 The rise of a digital Afrikaans haven 49 A new laager 58 3 A hundred years of Afrikaans film (1916-2015) 61 The foundational years 63 Apartheid cinema 71 An apparent end and revival 77 Finding an audience, producing an audience 83 Rotating on the same spot 90 kykNET 94 Afrikaners, film and postnationalism 97 4 Story of a South African farm attack 101 A synopsis of Treurgrond 102 The making of a crime story 103 The farm: then 106 The farm: now 107 The Garden of Eden 113 The first serpent: land claims 115 The second serpent: farm attacks 117 Whites in “peril” 120 Restoring order 121 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 5 5 Conclusion 123 References 127 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 6 Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr Bernard Dubbeld, my supervisor, for his dedication to this project and also for his substantial and much-appreciated contribution to my intellectual awakening. Thank you to Stellenbosch University’s Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology that provided me with a productive learning environment during this study – lecturers, colleagues, fellow tutors and friends, you are all much-loved and appreciated. For funding, I am grateful to have received a scholarship from the National Research Foundation and also the HB and MJ Thom scholarship. Thank you to my family: my parents for their continued support and willingness to listen; Rinet and Xander van Lill who at various times were there when I needed them. Thank you to all my friends who stuck by me. And of course, thank you to my wife Anri Hendricks for accompanying me on this journey and for allowing me to see the world through her eyes. 7 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 7 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 8 1 Introduction This study deals with the recent revival and expansion of the Afrikaans film industry. While this industry flourished under the apartheid state’s extensive subsidy scheme – with sometimes more than ten films released within a single year – South Africa’s democratic transition and the subsequent rescinding of the subsidy scheme seemed to announce the Afrikaans film’s death. Only three Afrikaans-language feature films1 were produced between 1994 and 1998, appearing to signal the end of Afrikaans filmmaking. Not a single Afrikaans film was released on the mainstream circuit for the following nine years. And then the Afrikaans film made its unexpected return to the silver screen in 2007. Managing to find – or to produce – an audience for its films, this industry began to burgeon, attracting a substantial number of directors, producers, funders and other stakeholders. Between 2007 and 2015, a total of 61 Afrikaans feature films were released on the mainstream circuit at a rate akin to the heyday of apartheid. The vast majority of these films have been tailored to the imagined needs and expectations of, marketed to, and consumed by white Afrikaans-speakers – Afrikaners2 (as I show in Chapter 3). This, despite the fact that Afrikaners 1 I classify Afrikaans-language films as all films of which the vast majority of dialogue is in Afrikaans. Although I refer to some bilingual films in this text, I do not regard them as Afrikaans-language films per se. In addition, for the purpose of this study, I use the term “Afrikaans films” to include all Afrikaans feature-length films that have been released on the mainstream commercial circuit, excluding documentaries and films dubbed into Afrikaans. 2 For the purpose of this study, I use the term “Afrikaners” to denote white people who speak Afrikaans as a first language. I am well-aware that such a categorization is and has always been slippery. What, for example, should the test be to determine whiteness? In addition, some “Afrikaners” choose to distance themselves from any identification with “other” Afrikaners or with some form of “Afrikaner identity”, while other “Afrikaners”, in their everyday lives, speak little or no Afrikaans. This does not, however, take anything away from the fact that many – and possibly even the majority of – Afrikaners today consider themselves members of an Afrikaner community with its own cultural identity and heritage. For the purpose of this study, thus, I admit to the fact that Afrikaners are a diverse group of people with no unique essence and when I make claims about Afrikaners, in the present or in the past, I do not wish to generalize these claims to all Afrikaners. I am also cognisant of the fact that such claims can apply in different ways and to different degrees to different Afrikaners. By reserving the term “Afrikaners” for whites, I am also opposing a popular movement to use the term to signify all Afrikaans- 9 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 9 only make up about 40%3 of all Afrikaans-speakers. In addition, the Afrikaans film industry is only one element within a much larger – and equally thriving – Afrikaans culture industry, also mostly patronized by Afrikaners. Here, I use the term “culture industry”, coined by Adorno and Horkheimer (1972 [1944]), to include all commercial media and cultural forms, and all the commercial products of art and entertainment. To some extent, the revival and expansion of the Afrikaans film industry can be regarded as only one manifestation of a much larger process that is taking place across the entire Afrikaans culture industry – a process that, at first glance, appears highly paradoxical. While there has been an ongoing discourse, intermittently subsiding and flaring up since the advent of democracy, about the future of the Afrikaans language and its “endangered” status, Afrikaans has in recent years prospered in a plethora of market-driven domains. In this study, I am concerned with two central questions. How can this apparent paradox be accounted for? And what are the possible consequences of a vibrant Afrikaans culture industry, and Afrikaners’ collective consumption of Afrikaans-language media and cultural commodities, on postapartheid Afrikaner subjectivity and community formation? I attempt to answer these questions through an exploration of the Afrikaans film industry, situating its recent revival and expansion within the context of a broader Afrikaans culture industry and also within the context of postapartheid South Africa, where Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) have argued that African ethnicities have increasingly become branded and consumed. I consider the different historical, social, cultural and economic factors that have coalesced to enable its revival. Yet, as much as this is a study about Afrikaans film, it is also a study about Afrikaners and I would suggest that the Afrikaans film’s revival has opened up a privileged site, and a unique vantage point, from which to explore Afrikaner subjectivities. Thus, I also pay close attention to the position that the Afrikaans film occupies in the lives and imaginations of its speakers (i.e. Van Blerk 2015). Already in the 1960s, members of a group of Afrikaans writers, the so-called Sestigers [Sixtiers], demanded that the term be cleansed of its racial connotations and used to refer to all Afrikaans-speakers (Giliomee 1975, 30). In my experience, those who want to pin the label of Afrikaner onto all Afrikaans-speakers are almost always white. When referring to all first-language Afrikaans-speakers, I simply use the term “Afrikaans-speakers”. I am opposed to using the term “Afrikaanses”, as some Afrikaans newspapers do (Wasserman 2009, 74), to signify this group, since it suggests a sense of solidarity or community amongst all Afrikaans-speakers, which hardly exists in reality (as I show in Chapter 2). When referring to non-Afrikaner Afrikaans-speakers, I use the term “black Afrikaans-speakers” to include African, coloured and Indian Afrikaans-speakers. 3 Percentage based on census data from 2011 (SSA 2012, 26). 10 533846-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 2-8-2019 PDF page: 10 consumers and its part “in the reproduction of social experience” (Mazzarella 2004, 347). Approaching film Hitherto, few scholarly attempts have been made to account for the recent proliferation in the production of Afrikaans films, to trace its trajectory, to consider its significance or to contemplate its possible consequences.4 I can only assume that the poor aesthetic quality and escapist nature of the bulk of these films have inspired some academic aversion.