“Everyone Is Guilty”: Complicitous Critique and the Plaasroman Tradition in Etienne van Heerden’s Toorberg (Ancestral Voices)

The plaasroman (farm novel) of the 1920s and 1930s allowed Afrikaans writers to assert and explore a bond between the farmer and the soil, a bond that stands metonymically for the relations between culture, place and nation. This essay argues that Etienne Van Heerden’s 1986 novel, Toorberg, adapts and transforms the conventions of the plaasroman genre to give voice to a complicitous critique of the consequences of Afrikaner racial exclusivity in the 1980s. As a counterdiscursive plaasroman, Toorberg reveals and works through various layers of complicity finally to offer a prophetic glimpse of the possibility of reconciliation between possessors and the dispossessed. In documenting the clannish pride, aloofness, and arrogance of an aristocratic Afrikaans family, and by showing how these qualities result in the exclusion and impoverishment of its mixed-race relatives, Van Heerden’s novel maps the psychosocial underpinnings of apartheid.