It’s understandable that a group feeling its loss of status would want to reach back for icons and moments in history to be proud of. But, aside from the fact that chanting a general’s name is a strange habit in a democracy, the cause that De la Rey fought for was less than commendable. Sure, the Boers were resisting British imperialism, but it was for the sake of their own right to marginalize and exploit the African population without British interference. – Thursday Video: Rock song rekindles ethnic tensions in South Africa – FP Passport

Michael Cognato’s expression of the “cause they fought for” may be an unconscious slight of the American and Canadian causes which motivated self-government in these countries. A mimetic desire to defer guilt or at the very least, a sense of responsibility, for our American and Canadian past upon the Boers is a curious, but I believe real phenomenon in North America. The Boers/Afrikaners are so well known by their critics here on the North American continent, because the Boers are a vivid image of themselves.

But there is great cause for self-doubt, problems for the language which we decide to frame the past of South Africa and for assuming that the Boers do not share a common history with their Canadian and American counterparts: Milnerism is one (which mhambi puts out well), but another problematic phenomenon to be wrestled with is the “race conciliation” discourse of Louis Botha’s first government of the Transvaal and subsequently of the Union. That discourse, albeit referring to white – white race relations, ought to jar our ability to wholesale blame the past – for there is something there that sounds very similar to the most progressive or perhaps simply the conscientious of us.

H/T: mhambi

I came across an interesting post and video today that suggests Afrikaner nationalism is not lost on the youth. The song “de la Rey” is in reference to one of the generals who lead the Boers in the Anglo Boer War. Why the attention is on him and not others, I do not know. The song’s chorus summons the general to lead his people, a people that will rise again.

The video sticks to a scene of men up against a sandbag wall, apparently waiting miserably for leadership as is represented by de la Rey riding on a black horse. To be stuck behind a wall, a fence for the wife and child in the video, has a curious connotation to it. Since the dominant strategy for the Boers was guerilla tactics, the image doesn’t seem historically accurate, leading me to believe that it represents something of the present situation.

The Ministry of Arts & Culture’s statement in response to the song, titled “on Bok Van Blerks’s Supposed Afrikaans “Struggle Song,” De La Rey and Its Coded Message to Fermenting Revolutionary Sentiments“, thinks the song is great as a “historical curiosity” but warns anyone thinking there is any contemporary relevance to the song. Anyone with the wrong interpretation of it are endanger of treason. The statement concludes by wishing the song writer good luck “and who knows, if it’s really good, it might even become an international hit.”

If it is really good. That’s pretty funny.

My mom continues her letter to me:

Needless to say, Johannes refused to go back the next day.  He told me and Dad that he would not be friends with a single kid in his class as they are all looking like they are not interested in school at all.  He found the girls to be dressed up as if they were going to a party and looked rather 16 than 14!  He was so disgusted!  Rene cried the entire time and had stomach cramps and could not sleep the last 2 nights.  Johannes is talking in his sleep and his parents lay awake at night…

It is all rather depressing to read this, but it doesn’t matter does it? For that part of me that does claim some sense of an identity, this sort of incident weighs upon both my sense of guilt and self-loathing. “This is what you and your family get and rightfully deserve for being Afrikaners. This is white, christian privilege avenged.”
On the other hand, for that part of me that believes that claims to a national identity and spirit are contrived, this is nothing other than a badly delivered story about immigrants struggling to acclimatize to a country that farcically claims to be multicultural. Still, all this is still the immigrants’ fault. Yes it is. If they’ve got a complaint, they should speak up.
No?

“So what are you doing with yourself these days – leading a life of pleasure?” – that is what the man [who sees me now] would say, smiling genially. What could I say in return? That we cannot always be working, that life is short, we must taste its pleasures while we can? What a joke, and what a scandal too! For the stubborn, mean lives that my ancestors lived, sweating in their dark clothes in the heat and dust of the Free State, to eventuate in this: a young man sauntering around a foreign city, eating up his savings, drinking lattes, pretending to be a writer! How can I so casually betray them and then hope to escape their avenging ghosts? It was no in the nature of those men and women to be gay and have pleasure, and it is not in mine. I am their cihld, foredoomed from birth to be gloomy and suffer. How else does poetry come anyway, except out of suffering, like blood squeezed from stone?

South Africa is a wound within me. How much longer before the wound stops bleeding? How much longer will I have to grit my teeth and endure before I am able to say, ‘Once upon a time I used to live in south Africa but now I live in the United States’? (pg 116, from youth – scenes from provincial life II)

I’ve put this passage in the first person and replaced actions and nouns to show what I see in this when I read it.