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  • Biblical Mythology in André Brink’s Anti-Apartheid Crusade
  • Isidore Diala (bio)

Abdul R. JanMohamed has argued that the transformation of racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference is at the heart of the economy of the central trope of imperialist practice, the manichean allegory. Tracing the phenomenologial origins of this metonymic transformation ultimately to the “neutral” perception of physical difference, he amply demonstrates how the allegorical extensions of this transformation dominate every facet of imperialist mentality (61). With reference to South Africa, Susan VanZanten Gallagher has methodically indicated how the writing of Ralph Standish (1612), which represents the black as a subhuman and mythical other, is representative of a long tradition of colonial writing, spanning the works of John Jordain (1608), Hondius (1652), Kolb (1719), Mentzel (1785), Barrow (1801), and Philip (1828), all aimed at the justification of European colonization.

In a recent inquiry into the white’s reflexive perception of the black migrant worker, Michael Wade reveals its culmination in a “distressing arrest in the development of White perception” (21) and explains this as the result of the impossibility of the white South African to see the black objectively. Wade’s historical focus is mainly the years spanning the industrialization of South Africa, after the discovery of diamonds in the northwestern Cape in 1860. But his findings are typical: the roots of the whites’ perception of the black are fully in economics. In the documents of the white imagination, the novel, poetry, drama, the newspaper, and other forms in which whites engage themselves effectively in a dialogue (speaking only less effectively to others), Wade notes:

The giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the Whites’ deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matte black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an understanding of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago.

(1)

This essay proposes to consider André Brink’s frequent depiction of characteristic Afrikaner reduction of the Bible to a white mythology that complements the materiality of apartheid. Read in the self-regarding gaze of Afrikaner consciousness severely hampered and narrowed by its morbid obsession with its tribulations and even threats of extinction in a heathen land, the Bible is distorted to a justification of a racist ideology. Like historiography and cartography, theology too has become a species of mythmaking, annexed into the formidable machinery specifically created to empower the Afrikaner Establishment through the presentation of an authorized version of reality. [End Page 80]

Brink has noted that in its anxiety and desperation to create for itself a self-validating image, apartheid had to annex realms of human value other than the overtly political:

For apartheid to be sanctioned as the definitive characteristic of the Afrikaner Establishment, it had to reach far beyond the domain of politics: it was not simply a political policy ‘adopted’ as a response to the racial situation in the country but had to be accepted as an extension of an entire value system, embracing all the territories of social experience, economics, philosophy, morality and above all religion. The Church itself had to provide the ultimate justification for the ideology.

(Mapmakers 18–19)

If the “Christianization” of apartheid and the appropriation of religion was to the Afrikaner Establishment the ultimate temptation, the reason is quite obvious: the projection of Afrikaner imperialism onto the revealed word of God as divine ordinance, in Afrikaner consciousness, gave apartheid the final legitimacy. Thus, the Dutch Reformed Church was transformed to the abettor of the National Party, providing it with theological support for the segregation of the races.

In his representative awareness of the politics of reading the Bible, Archbishop Desmond Tutu refutes the claims to universality that Western theology for long arrogated to itself, and endorses the validity of rival theologies arising from the specific terms and conditions of life in Third World countries. Among these, he recognizes Liberation Theology developed in Latin America, and Black Theology developed in the USA and Southern...

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