Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life by Megan Lewis (review)

Troubling rises in white nationalism, xenophobia, and economic protectionism occasioned both the 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the advent of so-called Trumpism in the United States. These recent events have underscored the necessity of scholarship that engages critically with performances of whiteness. In this regard Megan Lewis's Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life offers a prescient case study in the creation, enactment, and contestation of whiteness and hegemony. For Lewis, performing whitely connotes "a state of being, an ideology, a set of behaviors or habits, or an enactment, performance or staging with distinctly white attributes" (11). Taking inspiration from John Fletcher's provocation that "you can't afford to treat communities and groups that you politically oppose, however fiercely, as if their motivations and habitus aren't as complex and historically intricate as any other community or group" (qtd. in Lewis 5), Lewis deftly delves into the history and culture of Afrikaners, the white South African minority notorious for creating the legally sanctioned racist system of oppression known as apartheid.

Unlike previous studies that touch on Afrikaners and performance (Kruger [1999] and Hutchison [2013]), Lewis focuses on the laager—the literal circle of wagons that signified safety for the Afrikaners' ancestors as they trekked inland to avoid the advancing British—as a metaphor not only for Afrikaner self-definition, but also for the system of whiteness itself. In her description the laager consists of two self-contradictory parts: the circle of wagons, seemingly impermeable and exclusive; and the spaces in between the wagons, the sites of vulnerability and potential contamination. "Like whiteness," writes Lewis, "the laager must maintain a belief in its infallibility to remain intact and powerful and, like whiteness, it becomes vulnerable to anxiety when its porousness is revealed" (28). Lewis chronicles various incursions into and renegotiations surrounding the Afrikaner laager from its inception in late-nineteenth-century nation-building projects, to its culmination in the 1948 elections that brought the Afrikaner-led National Party to power, to its eventual decline and precarious postapartheid position.

Over the course of six insightful chapters she traces how Afrikaners "have performed and continue to perform themselves into, around, and out of power" (18; emphasis in original). In "Laagers of Whiteness: Afrikaner Ascendancy and the Staging of the Nation," Lewis tracks how Afrikaner nationalists, eager to transform their defeat in the disastrous Second Anglo-Boer War into a foundational myth, imagined a unified volk (Afrikaans for nation) out of a group of disparate agrarians known as boers (Afrikaans for farmers) (25). She argues that the 1916 silent film De Voortrekkers epitomized this effort by romanticizing the 1830s Great Trek and outlining the internal-white-laager / externalblack-threat discourse that later defined apartheid. Lewis rightly holds that Afrikaner narratives of "rugged masculinity and docile femininity" buttress white patriarchy (15). Central to Afrikaners' nation-building project, in her estimation, is the icon of the Volksmoeder, or "Mother of the Nation" (40). Contemplating the Volksmoeder statue guarding Pretoria's Voortrekker Monument, Lewis states that "she preserves civilization and light amid the brutality and darkness of Africa and is the emblem of the Afrikaner's future" (44). Lewis's critical readings of the monument, as well as of the 1938 celebrations surrounding its dedication, expose the gendered nature of Afrikanerdom. Following this first chapter, she proceeds by thickly describing the performance strategies of five contemporary male Afrikaner artists: playwright Deon Opperman, satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, and performance artist Peter Van Heerden, as well as rappers Watkin Tudor Jones (aka Die Antwoord's Ninja), and Zander Tyler (aka Jack Parow).

Spanning the book's second and third chapters, Lewis's treatment of Opperman represents one of the most thorough examinations of the provocateur's prodigious output. The most prolific Afrikaans-language playwright working today, he frequently tackles controversial subjects...