In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life by Megan Lewis
  • Loren Kruger
megan lewis. Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 246, illustrated. $55.00 (Pb).

Megan Lewis begins her book with the reminder that South Africa and the United States share a racist history that neither has overcome: “in both my home and adopted countries are systems of white supremacy that privilege portions of the population over others [. . .] and allow white authorities to enact violence on black and brown bodies” (xii). In South Africa today, however, Afrikaners – members of the exclusive group within the white minority that once enjoyed economic, political, and cultural privileges – protest their [End Page 538] marginalization in performances that hark back to the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and other scenes of heroic defeat. While some Afrikaners, notably dissident Max du Preez, dispute this marginalization, and others, such as hip-hop group Die Antwoord and performance artist Peter van Heerden, treat this image-repertoire with mordant irony, the spectacles of heroic victimhood that occupy part of Lewis’s study have drawn crowds to the State Theatre in Pretoria.

Before evaluating Afrikaners’ place in “theatrical and public life,” however, we must acknowledge the violence of Afrikaner power. Lewis notes the racist underpinnings of the “ethnomythology” (23) of a righteous volk battling “uncivilized hordes” (15) in pageants staged before Afrikaners came to power – especially the much-analysed Voortrekker Centenary of 1938 and the accompanying film Die Bou van ‘n Nasie [Building a Nation] (chapter one). Her analysis, in chapter two, of the Boer War Circus at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which featured former general Piet Cronjé attempting to “enlighten the Americans about [his] persecuted people” (55), illuminates a significant event that has received little attention. But she tips her hand toward what John Fletcher has called “avowed sympathy” (qtd. in Lewis 5) by omitting performances produced by Afrikaners in power, especially the Van Riebeeck Tercentenary (1952) and the Republic Festival (1966). Both promoted the ideology of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd, who, despite his “gentlemanly appeal” (15), forged the juggernaut that uprooted three million South Africans from their homes and created a ruthless police system to persecute black and white opponents. The National Party also attacked Afrikaner dissidents, although these, including major poet–playwright N.P. van Wyk Louw in the 1960s and anti-apartheid satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys in the 1970s and 1980s (the star of chapter four), never suffered the levels of censorship and violence inflicted on black critics.

These omissions matter because Afrikaners’ perception of powerlessness before or after the apartheid era obscures their abuse of power from 1948 to 1994. To revise Lewis’s telling formulation, understanding how Afrikaners “perform themselves into, around, and out of power” (18; emphasis in original) requires knowing how they performed whiteness in power. Apartheid privileged all whites, but the state subsidized Afrikaner economic advancement [volkskapitalisme] as well as cultural hegemony by favouring Afrikaans over other languages. Historians who critique this Afrikanerization might have modified Lewis’s reliance on Herman Giliomee, whom Du Preez describes not as “one of the foremost historians on Afrikaners” (Lewis 17) but as an apologist for “race-based solutions to post-apartheid South Africa” (Du Preez 152). Dan O’Meara’s analysis in Forty Lost Years of the system supporting Afrikaner privilege makes current laments of marginalization dubious: Afrikaners today enjoy the same rights to language and culture guaranteed under [End Page 539] the Constitution. As Du Preez writes (and Lewis cites [168]), Afrikaans has thrived even though some regret the loss of Afrikaner supremacy.

Nonetheless, the contradictions of nostalgia can produce rich drama. The subject of Lewis’s third chapter is Deon Opperman’s five-hour epic Donkerland (1996). The performance traces Afrikaner history from the trekboer’s claim to Zulu land – and Zulu women – in 1838, through the documented suffering of Boer families (shadowed by unsung black retainers) in the British army’s concentration camps around 1900, to Boer migrants competing with black workers in the 1930s, and on to the Afrikaner ascendency from the 1950s...

pdf

Share