Tymon Smith Profiles Antjie Krog

November 24th, 2009 by Amanda

Antjie Krog’s latest work Begging to be Black is a treatise on difference. It asks challenging questions centred around “blackness” and “whiteness” while managing to embrace the value of interconnectedness.

She dealt with this incident in A Change of Tongue (2003), the second of her non-fiction books which looked at the struggles of Afrikaners to adapt to transformation and which followed Country of My Skull, the phenomenally successful and open-hearted account of her experiences as a reporter during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
With the publication of Begging to be Black, the latest and, she says, the last of her non-fiction books, Krog has produced a trilogy which she hopes will be read as “a record of a white person’s struggle to belong, to be embedded. Even if it’s a failed struggle, it brings clarity for me that if you’re aware it makes it easier.”