At a recent conference in Johannesburg hosted by the Goethe Institut, a debate was stirred up around the question of whether art should be used as a “weapon” in the struggle for equality. Antjie Krog, author of Begging to Be Black, presented her thoughts on the controversial Bok van Blerk song “De La Rey”, about an Anglo-Boer War general, that many have read as an explicit rejection of South Africa’s post-apartheid political dispensation – a call for a new “Afrikaner uprising”. Not so, said Krog: the song has been misunderstood, and has an altogether more positive meaning:
Three years ago three young and unknown Afrikaner men, Bok van Blerk, Johan Vorster and Sean Else, produced a song about one of the lesser-known generals of the Anglo-Boer War: Koos de la Rey.
The Anglo-Boer War destroyed about a third of Afrikanerdom, with 26000 women and children dying in the first concentration camps of the 20th century.
De la Rey is portrayed in romantic heroic terms, contrasted with the boers in their trenches (themselves an invention of De la Rey) and the women and children in the concentration camps.
Video: Bok van Blerk’s “De La Rey” song with English subtitles
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November 10th, 2009 @10:53 #
A remarkably sanguine and convoluted interpretation of the De La Rey phenomenon.
As one who has attended countless braais in Pretoria where this song has started playing, there is no doubt in my mind that it has become the anthem of Afrikaner resistance to the new SA order.
Most white English-speaking South Africans have never even heard of the song, so for Krog to suggest that it is they who have imposed the notion of a new Afrikaner resistance onto the song is misguided to say the least. It rose up among Afrikaners themselves at the precise moment that they were feeling at their most embattled, powerless and in need of inspiring leadership.
Sometimes the obvious interpretation is the correct one.
November 10th, 2009 @11:19 #
Very well put, Fiona.
November 10th, 2009 @11:55 #
Thanks Fifi, I read Krog's piece with interest and couldn't quite articulate why it didn't gel for me (doesn't help that I'm part of the constituency that never heard the song). You've put my puzzlement into words.
November 10th, 2009 @14:27 #
I love the sensibility behind what Antjie Krog is saying, and I really, really, really want to imagine that she's right on this one. But, yeah, I'm scratching my head too.
November 12th, 2009 @13:01 #
I love Antjie Krog, love her, especially her poetry. Her realism-prose is not my favourite genre but I appreciate her engagement with this process of coming to terms with the past. The Germans call it Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung. Trust the Germans to come up with a term, but then again they needed it! Perhaps so do we? My mother is from Berlin, my grandfather fought in the war, I'm a German-speaking white South African= mea culpa maxima.
To me this Bok van Blerk song hits the same nerve as reading about neo-nazi activities in Germany. I apologise if I offend anyone, but I'm very touchy about this. By all means, redefine yourself at all times, but not with neo-nationalism. The "Boere" were lead to victory in 1948, they do not need to be freed from the "Khakis", which I think borders on hate-speech. And had their rule been a just one they may not feel such a strong need to sing an ode to De La Rey? In Germany this would not have been tolerated, frankly. Germany is serving a lift sentence for past injustices, and rightly so. My husband is German (I just don't seem to get enough, do I?!) and he bemoans the lack of or even the complete denial of a national identity, but that's how it is, they brought it on themselves. You have to assume responsibility for what has happened, even if you were not personally involved. There's a book out there call Responsibility by JR Lucas. I fished this quote out of my incomplete MA thesis, he writes:
As we enter into the inheritance of our predecessors, we undertake some responsibility for what they did in the process of producing those good things we now enjoy. We cannot eat the fruits of their labours and wash our hands of the stains of their toil. At the very least we take on some civil liability to make reparation for what was done in the course of producing those benefits. But often our responsibility goes further than that. We identify with our forebears and make their values our own. In so far as we take pride in what our predecessors have done, and enter into their achievements and make it a constitutive part of our identity, we identify also with the bad things they have done and make their misdeeds our misdeeds for which we must answer, as much as we make their exploits our exploits for which we take credit. The more we preen ourselves and are proud, the more also we must shoulder the concomitant responsibility and take the blame.
Food for thought, indeed.
And to top it all now I've had that bloody song in my head for three days!!
November 12th, 2009 @13:06 #
And of course I meant a life sentence, not a lift sentence, hello! Sorry.
November 12th, 2009 @13:26 #
Fine points, Annette, and well made.
I, too, am suffering from a tune that will not go away... It's an earworm.
November 12th, 2009 @13:28 #
*Note to self* do not play video clip -- earworm risk.
November 12th, 2009 @14:50 #
An interesting post, Annette. There are definite parallels with Nazi Germany, and indeed with every other oppressive regime in history.
However, I have never agreed with the German policy of restricting free speech in the name of making reparations for the War. I'm told that Holocaust denialism is actually a crime in Germany, which seems to me ridiculous. The War was fought by the Allies in order to preserve certain individual liberties that Nazism was threatening. To go and throw those liberties away as a means of celebrating the Allied effort is a huge shame.
I am happy to live in a country that would never dream of banning a song like De La Rey, which, let's face it, is actually entirely innocuous. But even if it weren't, I would still want to see it tolerated.