(Un)Patriotic Acts of an Imagined Community: The Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) (review)

Scholars and reporters have criticized the annual Afrikaans-language KKNK festival for perpetuating the principle of the laager, or circle of wagons, creating an exclusionary, white cultural festival—a Boerefees—each year in Oudtshoorn, South Africa. The 2008 festival had its share of nostalgic, sometimes disturbing performances of whiteness, but simultaneously enacted a nuanced questioning of exactly what the imaginings of this imagined community of white settlers in Africa are, or can be. These acts, circling around issues of land, identity, heroes, whiteness, brownness, and belonging, articulated the diversity of what it means to be an Afrikaner in contemporary South Africa.

Imagine Saad (Seed), written by Saartjie Botha and directed by Jaco Bouwer: on a makeshift stage peppered with mounds of rich brown soil, a family of white Afrikaners wrestles with the death of their patriarch (Marthinus Basson) and what to do with the family’s farm—their grond (ground/earth/soil). This overwrought drama seemed to be working toward a settling of accounts: the father’s will (ominously mentioned three times) has yet to be read, and we assume that the land will be bequeathed to the two silent black women (Thembeka Sivanjana and Yoliswa Nkolose) who form the furniture and scenery—even a kitchen doorway!—against which the white characters play. Quietly carrying sprouting mielie (corn) babies on their backs, these two ciphers are silent in the contemporary debate over land redistribution—the anxious core of this play—that is dividing many contemporary communities and that signals a symbolic and physical loss of identity, power, and place in the national landscape for many Afrikaners. The two actresses were hired from the local community for this show—”It was a good job,” they told the visiting Dutch delegation when asked about their participation—and expressed no deep connection to the text or the performance. Bouwer seems to have ignored the troubling implications of staging silent black bodies without any agency. Instead of a transformative story through which the anxiety over land loss or the role of whites in South Africa’s history is worked, this play becomes a reinscription of the familiar narratives justifying white land-ownership. The dead patriarch haunts the final scene, admonishing his three adult children for not believing in “the language of grond” well enough to hold on to the farm. In a poignant stage picture, their mother (Juanita Swanepoel) feeds each of them a spoonful of the brown soil. Saad’s message is a forcefeeding of the age-old story of white dominion over the land and its silenced black inhabitants. Judging by audience response, for many, this story was a welcome communion with the past. But in 2008, in South Africa, even within the Afrikaner laager of the KKNK, such a story is unpalatable.

Marthinus Basson and Altan Ungerer in Saad. Photo: Michael Hammond.

Imagine, now, the heroes: in 2006, pop singer Bok van Blerk released his chart-topping single, “De La Rey,” a homage to General Koos de la Rey—a Boer War hero with a wild, bushy beard who led the Boers to victory over the British. The nostalgic anthem’s refrain asks: “De la Rey, will you come to lead the Boers?” The song became a battle hymn for white Afrikaners, a cry of longing for the heroic masculinity of the past, and a trigger point for renewed performances of volktrots (national pride) as well as heated public debate.

In contrast, Mike van Graan’s 2008 play Die Generaal focuses on a different kind of general: Bolla, a prisoner earning his gang rank through murder, a monstrous man born of the apartheid past whose presence is a constant reminder of the violence, pain, and anger that haunt South Africa today. Like Saad, Die Generaal addresses land loss, but here the playwright explores the complexities of all the stakeholders in the democratic South Africa. Using the rear wall of the stage as a chalkboard...