Bitter Afrikaners and their treatment in three recent South African novels: Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit and Troy Blacklaws's Karoo Boy

Ken Barris

Read at the Africa in Literature conference, organised by the English Academy and in association with AUETSA, SAWA, SAVAL and SACCLALS, July 2005.

The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut		Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor		Karoo Boy by Troy Blacklaws

Since 1994 there have been notable shifts in the distribution of political power in South Africa. One of these has been the way in which voices representing Afrikaans political and cultural organisations have portrayed the contemporary state of the white Afrikaans community. One might characterise this as a movement away from the confident assertions of a minority in control of its own historical destiny - and eager to extend that control to the lives of others - to a more defensive stance, ranging from gestures of commitment to the new order on the one hand, and the protests of a beleaguered minority on the other. In view of this change in the political landscape, I will explore ways in which three 21st century novels have represented Afrikaners and their role in the body politic of fictive South Africa, namely Karoo Boy by Troy Blacklaws, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor and The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut.

In Karoo Boy, the markers of Afrikanerdom are unambiguous: the Afrikaans characters speak the language and have Afrikaans names. The name of the town itself is not insignificant, particularly as it is appears to be a fictitious one. "Stone Village" carries obvious implications of harshness and suggests an unyielding surface. To place it in context, this text is rich in ethnic references. There is relentless racial categorisation of bystanders, often with stereotypical accents and dialects to match, and stereotypical cultural beliefs. Given this density of ethnic tagging, and given the richness of teenage slang in the narrator's idiolect, "Klipdorp" also hints at the terms rock and rockspider, pejorative descriptors of Afrikaners widely used by English-speaking white South Africans.

Commandant Moller in Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor is more subtly delineated as an Afrikaner. However, he is implicitly but clearly introduced as one: the narrator Frank Eloff, a young military doctor on the Angolan border, is sent to the Commandant when he summons a medic precisely because Eloff can speak better Afrikaans than the other medic on duty. Furthermore, Moller's first words in the novel are Afrikaans, after which he speaks a syntactically uninflected English, except for an isolated interrogative nè in sentence-final position.

Achmat Dangor's Lieutenant du Boise is more problematic. While he does have an Afrikaans name, many English-speaking South Africans do. He speaks little Afrikaans, and his English is unmarked by any Afrikaans forms. However, the Afrikaans he does speak comes at a key moment: while he is raping Lydia Ali, in the narrative past of the novel. Then he is a security branch policeman, and she is the wife of anti-apartheid activist Silas Ali. In this critical moment, Lieutenant du Boise calls Lydia, in her recollection of the event, "a lekker wilde Boesman poes" (Dangor 2001:19). The full sentence is this (19): "He called me a nice wild half-kaffir cunt, a lekker wilde Boesman poes." While the sentence begins in English, the Afrikaans paraphrase suggests that Lydia recalls the Lieutenant's expression verbatim; there is little other reason why she should switch to Afrikaans at this point. It is also not a literal translation, but one which diverges in its details from the English version, suggesting not a clarification for her husband Silas's sake, which would be unmotivated, but the recollection of an original utterance. While some of the characters do routinely mix Afrikaans and English, it is not one of Lydia's speech habits. If this argument is rejected, however, it remains hard to escape the implication that Dangor did intend at least an element of Afrikaans patrimony in giving Du Boise his name. The implications of this patrimony for the novel are far-reaching indeed, as will be discussed below.

All three novels draw their energies from the apartheid era in particular ways. Karoo Boy, published in 2004, is set in 1976 (though it sports a couple of interesting anachronisms: the pink Cadillac set into the roof of the Hard Rock Café in Seapoint appears over a decade before its time; and James Dean makes a brief appearance as an icon over a decade too late). This is an apartheid era novel in which a confident ideology of racial supremacy, and unreflecting acts of racial violence, play a central role. Karoo Boy is a tale of a fourteen-year-old boy, Douglas, from Cape Town, who moves to the Karoo town of Klipdorp. This is a society dominated both at school and adult level by its Afrikaans inhabitants. Douglas is dismayed not only by their refusal to engage with him, but by the hostility and cruelty that he experiences from both teachers and pupils. There is one partial exception, the beautiful Marika, with whom he is able to strike up a relationship. The cruelty of this community is not only directed towards the English-speaking outsider Douglas, but also more cogently towards the black inhabitants of the town, a cruelty dramatised in the pair of gun-toting thugs in an Isuzu bakkie who terrorise Douglas's black friend Moses, and in Marika's shotgun-wielding father. The atmosphere is suggested by Marika's first words to Douglas's black friend Moses (Blacklaws 2004:99):

My pa does not want me to talk to blacks. He says blacks smell, and they rape white girls if they catch them in the veld. That's why he does not want to take me out by the reservoir.

Bitter Fruit has a more complex relationship with the apartheid past. It is set in 1998, a time in which Silas Ali is a high-level civil servant, pertinently placed as a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He encounters by chance a former security policeman, now an old man, who had detained him and raped his wife Lydia some twenty years before. Silas mentions this chance encounter to Lydia, with shattering results, as all the anguish and unresolved tension of that twenty-year-old moment return. In short, the transgression of apartheid has imprinted itself on the Ali family in a devastatingly personal way. This violation will become a cornerstone for the architecture of the present as far as the Alis are concerned, extending metonymically to society at large. Even more interestingly, the novel interrogates how this symbolic rape might be seen to move its consequences into the future. Lydia's son Mikey is a child of this rape. On discovering the secret of his origins, Mikey's resolution of the matter will be to kill the decrepit former security policeman who is his father.

In similar vein, The Good Doctor makes overt reference to the apartheid past, namely Frank Eloff's encounter on the Angolan border with Commandant Moller. In this encounter, Moller consults Eloff on a medical matter: Will the Swapo insurgent he is torturing, an asthma sufferer, survive further maltreatment? The sequence is a key event in the development of Frank's character, one that infuses him with a sense of helplessness and complicit guilt, which in turn determine his reactions in the present. However, the narrative also sets the past against the present in a more subtle and problematic manner. This is evident in the two senior villains in the piece, one being Colonel Moller (the Commandant Moller of former encounter), whose duty now is to police the border against smugglers; the other being the shadowy and nameless Brigadier, former military dictator of a former bantustan. The novel never quite establishes their villainy with any certainty; what it does suggest in this regard is delivered to the reader through the medium of the narrator Frank Eloff's suppositions, none of which is ever confirmed. In sum, the novel relies on apartheid era antagonists whose antipathetic acts in the present are never more than suppositionally realised. While Moller and the Brigadier are shown to be figures of maleficent power in the apartheid years, their maleficence in the present is a sleight of hand, deriving its readerly veil of authenticity from the nature of their positions in a pre-narrative past.

The three novels attribute to their Afrikaans antagonists - and they are all antagonists - different kinds of power, and consequently explore in them different qualities of otherness.

The Afrikaners in Karoo Boy exhibit a simple kind of power: brutality of thought, speech and action. Marika's father, for example, is concerned to protect his daughter from the contagion of social contact with black people, or even with those who like black people (Blacklaws 2004:103-4):

Marika's father snatches Marika's arm and he rattles her as if he wants to free a fishbone caught in her gullet.
       - I told you I don't want you hanging around kaffirs, or Cape Town kaffirboeties. Hoor jy my?
       - One day I will go to the black township, Marika shouts at him. You can't stop me.
Marika's father backhands [her] across the cheek.

There are other depictions of racist violence and abuse, such as the sadistic treatment of Douglas's black friend Moses by two young Afrikaans men whose weapon of choice is also a shotgun.

The phrase shotgun cowboys is used a number of times (137 ff). This is a suitable trope for agents of apartheid who sustain it in practice by direct physical action. Consequently, apartheid is not shown to be a complex form of social engineering, although this understanding is suggested clearly enough in the subtext. Here apartheid, with all its implications of racial superiority and race hatred, is mediated through personal acts of violence.

This presentation of shotgun-toting Afrikaners who replicate one another in diction, action and weapon, does not allow one to imagine the possibility that such violent and cruel people are Afrikaners in addition to their properties of hate-filled violence; it presents their hate-filled violence as an essence which is also named "Afrikaner". Nor does it explore, except in a relatively limited and unmarked way, what an Afrikaner life might contain other than the generic syndrome of apartheid. There is no exploration of any dynamic of racism that might render it understandable, if not acceptable; there is no such exploration on the part of the racists of Klipdorp by means of which they might grow beyond it; racist violence is a form of closure with which the crucial events begin and end.

There is little choice, consequently, in questions of identification. The otherness of Afrikaners is unambiguous, unmitigated, and quite insuperable. There is no possibility of seeing into these monoliths of ugliness and violence, and so the narrator does not interact with the crises of the novel so much as survive them. If there is growth, it is through ageing and hardening, and because his defences against a particular inner secret (which is beyond the scope of this paper) are dislodged by the harsh accidents of his life in the Karoo.

Colonel Moller in Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor is more of an establishment Afrikaner. The kind of power he wields is complex. In the apartheid era past of the novel he is a military commander. In the broader picture this is an illicit power, though within the internal spectrum of apartheid morality it is an institutional and legitimate one; however, as he presides over the torture of a Swapo insurgent in the past sequence, the tension between illicit and institutionally channelled power becomes cogent indeed.

In the post-apartheid present of the novel he has a paramilitary role in policing the border against smugglers, which on the surface at least represents a legitimate form of power. This power is compromised in two important respects. The first one lies in the appeals that Frank Eloff makes to him to act as the legitimate guardian of law and order against the supposed criminal transactions of the former bantustan Brigadier. Eloff supposes that the Brigadier might, in turn, be a smuggler of scrap metal stolen from the hospital, the abductor of Frank Eloff's lover Maria, and the abductor of Frank's colleague Waters. Moller fails to react to these suppositions, which is not surprising in view of the fact that none is ever vindicated.

The second compromising factor in regard to Moller's power is similarly ambiguous. Frank accuses Moller of having a certain hospital worker with criminal tendencies shot by his men. The colonel makes no response to this accusation; which, like the foregoing suppositions of criminality, is also never substantiated.

The scale of this uncertainty is evident in the narrative particulars, disclosed in key failures of causal sequence in the plot as managed by Frank's narration. For example, Frank Eloff goes to an abandoned army camp in search of his lover Maria, who disappears after an abortion, on the speculative grounds that the Brigadier has abducted her and taken her there. He finds nothing, except an entirely formless presence which rises up out of the dark and terrifies him. Eloff subsequently finds Colonel Moller at the only pub in town and informs him that the Brigadier can be found in the deserted army camp. The dialogue that follows emphasises the absent motivation for Eloff's conclusion (Galgut 2003:184):

"Did you see him there, Doctor?"

"No, I didn't see him. But I know he's there."

"How do you know?"

"I can't explain, Commandant. But I know."

It is a curious situation in which sites and figures of power in the apartheid era struggle to irrupt into the present with a criminal force that remains obdurately lacking, despite the narrator's energetic attempts to stir both into responsive life; and indeed partly because the writer so thoroughly subverts the narrator's attempts to order his world. The factor of identification becomes problematic indeed in the light of such multifoliate irresolution. While the dialogue and presence of the colonel are adequately menacing, the role accorded him acquires elements of formal absurdity; it is difficult to form a primitive response to a figure at once nominally threatening and structurally bathetic. What the narrative does maintain for the Afrikaans colonel is a peculiar composite stature: as that criminalised representative of law so generic to apartheid writing.

David Medalie (2003) argues that in the context of South African literature, writers who fail to engage sufficiently with the socio-political circumstances of the country are likely to be poorly received, or even ignored. Citing Green (1997), he argues further that a second criterion for positive reception of South African texts, both within the country and internationally, is realism as the preferred mode. Green (1997, in Medalie 2003:36) goes so far as to describe this second requirement as a "formal reflex of both the national and international perspective on South Africa". It seems that Galgut has paid due attention to this "formal reflex" while, at the same time, his iconoclastic instincts have driven him to subvert the empirical grounds on which realist political writing of the apartheid period erected figures such as Colonel Moller.

In the narrative present of Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit, Lieutenant du Boise is a spent force. Apart from the personal circumstance of his age and retirement, the changed political environment has removed whatever unconstitutional power he enjoyed as an apartheid era security policeman. However, his rape of Lydia Ali, committed twenty years before the present action, has deposited in Lydia and her family a nidus of power in particularly virulent form. Its outbreak is, in fact, the bitter fruit of the title.

On hearing of her husband's encounter with Du Boise, Lydia drops a glass of beer, and in a deliberate self-destructive act, cuts her feet badly on the fragments. It is clear that this self-mutilation gives expression, at last, to her long-repressed conflicts arising from the rape. Her act of self-mutilation might be read as a brief sermon on the dangers of repression and the vital importance of memory for societal health.

A second consequence of this rape is the compounding of identities, of rapist, mother and son, disclosed as Mikey learns of his own relationship with the critical event from Lydia's diary (Dangor 2001:116-7):

     "I crossed a divide that night … I also knew that something was stirring in me. I am pregnant, God, I am pregnant, I kept on repeating to myself, as if to exorcise the horror of that thought. But I knew it was true, and that I would have to conceal the moment of conception from everyone.
      "I debated with myself I could end the pregnancy. Abortions could be bought, even then. But I was already beginning to separate the child in me from the father's ugly, fleshy features, his grunts, his groans. Must the one life be damned because of the other? Yet, was I going to nourish, with my body and my life, the child of someone like Du Boise?
      "In the end, I compromised, told myself to wait until it was born. I would decide then whether it would live or die. I did not think about what judgement I would use to determine this. The way the child looked or smelled? I don't know. Nor did I think what I would do if I decided the child should die. Smother it when the nurses were not looking, break its tiny neck and proclaim to the world that I could not bear the thought of rearing a child of rape?
      "They dropped us off at the edge of the township, and Silas and I walked down the quiet, peaceful street, both of us silent. He had stopped moaning, but did not know how to reach out and touch me. Perhaps if he had, my mind might have been made up: I would have aborted the child the moment the pregnancy was confirmed. Perhaps his touch would have drawn me closer to him and to his struggle. Yes, he could have made me loyal to his affronted manhood, turned me into a soldier, perhaps, a fearless bomb planter or a ruthless arms smuggler. But his fear, that icy, unspoken revulsion, hung in the air like a mist. It would enable me to give life to Mikey, my son."

Du Boise's complexion is unnaturally white, heavily smeared with cream. Of course, his cancer. Michael sees the bits of flaking skin, those tired, red-rimmed eyes, the bitter half-smile, sees himself mirrored in the sweat breaking through the powdery brow. That could be my face one day, my thin body (how pot-bellied and red-faced he might have been were it not for the cancer!).
      My heritage, he says in a whisper, unwanted, imposed, my history, my beginnings.
      Michael fires - twice - directly into Du Boise's face, forgetting his carefully worked-out plan: shoot into the heart, it is quieter, tends to attract less attention. He wants to obliterate Du Boise's face, wipe away that triumphant, almost kindly expression, leave behind nothing but splintered bone and shattered skin.

A reciprocal irony lies in the neutering of Silas Ali, bearing in mind that he is a former anti-apartheid activist empowered rather ironically as an important figure in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Silas is displaced not only as the biological father of Lydia's son at the point of conception, but in perpetuity as Lydia's husband. Indeed, the narrative ends with the breaking of their marriage. The verdict of the novel thus seems to be that excising the oppressor from the body politic might well have cathartic value for all concerned, but will not easily overcome the effects of oppression.

In 1996, the South African novelist Mike Nicol made the following comment: "I very much doubt that we will see a return to the political realism that characterised the work of writers like Gordimer and Brink during apartheid. Today the demands have shifted and these demands insist on new ways of telling" (Nicol 1996).

The three 21st century novels discussed above all employ Afrikaans figures as antagonists, and all these antagonists are directly related to the transgressive thrust of apartheid. All three novels have been well received. Bitter Fruit and The Good Doctor were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004 and 2003 respectively, and while Blacklaws has not achieved such distinction, Karoo Boy has been taken on by American, British, Dutch and French publishers, and a film of it is to be made by Anant Singh (Martin, 2005). While their success can no doubt be attributed to many factors - and while the novels discussed have explored "new ways of telling" to a greater or lesser degree - it seems clear that the international market for South African writing continues to see an important place for apartheid-defined novels with reliable Afrikaans villains. History might have overthrown Afrikaner hegemony, but it survives in post-apartheid writing, sometimes adapting to changed circumstances, sometimes maintaining itself in the pure form with inverted nostalgic force.

1 There is a suggestive incestuous moment between Mikey and Lydia (Dangor 2001: 149): "She kissed her son carnally, she thinks, and he did not respond. Did she then kiss him with carnal intent? This objectified language helps. She kissed him, he started to kiss her back, then withdrew. She held him to her and felt his hard body, no, felt the hardness of his sex. For a moment, a mere moment. She was weeping, that was why he held her. She was distraught, she felt weak. Is that not how all women are described under such circumstances: weak? But it was she who led him to her bed, that narrow, borrowed bed meant for guests, but in which a guest has never slept."

Bibliography

Blacklaws, Troy. 2004. Karoo Boy. Cape Town: Double Storey Press.
Dangor, Achmat. 2001. Bitter Fruit. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Galgut, Damon. 2003. The Good Doctor. London: Penguin.
Green, Michael. 1997. Novel Histories: Past, Present and Future in South African Fiction. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand UP.
Martin, Russell. 2005. Personal communication. 22 June.
Medalie, David. 2003. The novels of Rhona Stern. English in Africa. 30 (1): 35.
Nicol, M. 1996. Writing in South Africa Today. Proceedings of December 12-14, 1996 International Seminar at the Université de La Réunion (France), organised by the Vice-Présidence des Relations Internationales and the Groupe de Recherches sur l'Afrique du Sud (G.R.A.S.). http://www2.univ-reunion.fr/~ageof/text/74c21e88-118.html.



LitNet: 13 December 2005

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