Ons Vir Jou
About a year and a half ago, I decided it was time for me to learn about South Africa. Not that I didn’t care before, but I had never sat down and made the effort. The process itself wasn’t unfamiliar to me, though. Phase One: identify topic. Phase Two: figure out why exactly it’s so important. Phase Three: read Wikipedia. Phase Four: scourge the obscurestest corners of the Internet for all kinds of interesting things about it.
No topic had much greater significance than another, outside of the varying success of Phase Two. I figured that every topic is of optimal importance to someone or other in the world, and so any given topic’s importance to me only depends on how much I know about it.
I did my research. I learned the South African national anthem and some folk songs on YouTube. I read all about the gold mines and the Boer Wars. I knew more or less where the different Black tribes originate from. I knew when my ancestors and the ancestors of the Afrikaners (who, by extension, I supposed were “my people”) arrived in South Africa and when the Great Trek happened and I memorized most of the dirty slang words all the races had for one another. Then I felt accomplished and moved on.
For some reason, De La Rey has been stuck in my head on and off for the past few weeks. Afrikaans folk songs get stuck in my head frequently for no good reason, but this one in particular has been in my head. I happened to wonder to myself a few days ago who De La Rey really was and why everyone loved him so much. Whether the people actually knew him, or if he was just a figure of hope and encouragement. As an afterthought, I wondered whether he was real. I knew the fact of his existence is real, because I’ve read of him online. But in all honesty, he wasn’t much more real to me than Odysseus or George Washington or Akhenaten… Just another name with a set of attributes I memorized, many of which are probably myth.
Tonight, my mother and brother and I met three of my cousins and some friends of theirs for dinner and a musical at the Staats Teater, the State Theater. This particular show, we’re told, already had a long run about a year ago and was called back for a few more weeks this year. For those of you who are Seattlites, the State Theater is kind of Benaroya-like, but with the function of Paramount or Fifth Avenue. It’s in the middle of downtown Pretoria and has been there since my dad was growing up – when we drove through the city last year, he pointed it out to us. All the older signs are in both Afrikaans and English, and it’s quite obvious that in the “good old days,” it was completely white and completely Afrikaans there. It was also obvious, as we got closer to the building, that this particular show was going to be a bit of a throwback to that time.
I’ve been intrigued to find over the past few years that most differences in worldview and doctrine are determined by differences in priority or importance, not actually whether things are good or bad. Likewise, there’s not much I can say to make the American reader say, Hey, I don’t recognize that, in my description of the building and the people and my experience. A Seattlite would not have felt particularly out of place. But just as I feel at home in a certain type of philosophy or theology over others that I more or less agree with, it was just so obvious that I was in a sea of people that were my own people.
I’m not used to that. It’s a little like the feeling I’ve gotten before at school or in online communities when you belong to something bigger than yourself and you feel like you have something important or fundamental in common with other people, but it’s never been on such a monumental scale. It was like everyone there was distantly related to me in some way (which, apparently, has some truth to it, because the gene pool was so small at one point). Like, if my family were in charge of a big production like that, there’s no chance in hell there wouldn’t be a gigantic counter, maybe three square meters, full of white ceramic coffee cups (with saucers) for Intermission. If my family were the whole audience, there wouldn’t be multiple callbacks or encores after the show. If my family had written the musical, it would probably be slightly cheesy in parts, but have very powerful, moving music and be completely sincere. Something resonated in a very simple, powerful way. I’m not used to seeing a full-length musical written in both my first languages in a gigantic room full of exclusively white people that are almost exclusively Afrikaans. I heard only one English –speaking person all night, and she was muttering to herself in the bathroom. The whole crowd defaulted Afrikaans. I told my cousins at Intermission that I don’t think I’ve ever quite realized that the secret code my parents taught us as kids is understood and spoken by millions of people with the same history and heritage as me….. I still don’t think I have. I realize it anew every time I’m placed in a social situation of that sort.
There’s good reason this show’s audience was so thoroughly Afrikaans, and not just because that was the script’s primary language. The show is called “Ons vir Jou,” or “Us for You,” and is about what is normally referred to as “Die Oorlog,” The War. The Boer War, at the turn of the 20th century, is arguably the most monumental point in the history of the Afrikaners, particularly before ’94. It affected literally everyone in the population and in an incredibly drastic way. Almost all our folk songs are from that time, it deeply influenced the next century’s politics, nearly 10 percent of the population died. You know. Big deal. I would say the War changed the Afrikaners, but more than that, big, drastic events like that expose a lot about the existing character of a people. A revelatory milestone, if you will.
The way gender operated in that society and worldview rather surprised me, for one. What I can resonate with as consistent with what I’ve seen in my own family is that the Boers tended to have a much more egalitarian view of gender than Anglo cultures. For the same reasons Wyoming gave women the vote as early as the 1860s, the women on the platteland, the country, had to be strong and had to work just as men had to, albeit in different ways. There wasn’t the same hierarchy or focus on masculine leadership, because the fact of the matter was that both men and women had to lead, and there don’t seem to have been any restrictions but natural ones on the specific content of either gender’s activities.
Patriotism was another of those areas of “revelation,” as well as justice, as well as religion. It’s not that the Boers weren’t patriotic before, but there wasn’t much of an occasion to show it. Life was life. They were just a bunch of farmers that refused to live in the Cape if the British were going to lord over them, and so they made the Great Trek up to the Highveld area around Johannesburg and Pretoria that later became the two Boer Republics: the Orange Free State and Transvaal. It’s true that they waged a few big wars against the Zulus and other Black tribes and won (against unthinkable odds), but those wars were simpler. Nothing since the Great Trek was so bitterly important. Unlike the Zulu wars, the Boer War was a culture war, and it was total war. In the words of one of the girls from Ons Vir Jou, it was as if “our men are strong enough that you cowards need to wage war against the women and children.” And these people were literally my great grandparents. All of my great-grandparents. Everyone was affected. Everyone had to endure incredible hardships to make it through.
One of my Oupa Mocke’s uncles died in a camp. Another was sent off to an island as a POW. My Ouma Nancy’s paternal grandfather was a missionary doctor in the field, and her English grandfather left her grandmother to be taken to the camps as he ran off with his secretary. The history is very fresh. Emotions lie very close to the surface.
There was a speech De La Rey gave in the play, one of those inspirational speeches. I suppose I’ve heard similar speeches in American History (“We’ve done great things! We are a great people! We come from somewhere! We’re going somewhere! God is with us!”), but there’s something about hearing those things said in the language of your mother and father and ancestors, the language of your childhood and your dinner table, that makes it seem so much more true and powerful. There’s something about actually being able to relate to the things being communicated that turns it from Motivational Speech to the communication of a profoundly important truth. Something fundamental. It resonates.
And for good reason. The Boers shouldn’t have survived, or been civilized, or had much of a culture, or their own unique language, or a Parliament, or anything. It’s really something to be proud of. They had a hard life. They fought hard every day just to survive, just to keep their people alive. And then there came a time when this relatively peace-loving, pious, faithful, very simple folk had to think about whether they would risk sacrificing that peace for justice, for a chance at keeping what they (honestly, quite rightly) saw as a greedy, snobbish, disrespectful, and extrinsically-motivated culture out of the society they’d poured so much sweat and blood into establishing. And very reluctantly, but very firmly, they said, Yes, I will defend my right to be here against the most powerful nation in the world despite overwhelming odds. And they won once. They nearly won again. And then their population was crushed and they all nearly starved to death.
A hundred years later, this same population voted a black president into office. There was no real war. Believe it if you will or not, a tiny fraction of the population was actually affected by any violence, especially at the previous century’s standards. White South Africa – the Afrikaners, the very people that, just a couple generations prior, knowingly sacrificed ten percent of their people in an attempt to keep their nation intact – handed over the whole government quite peacefully and has become incredibly progressive in the twenty years since Mandela’s election, despite incredible reason for pessimism. The economy is wavering, AIDs and poverty seem relentless, the news spews out story after terrible story. We have left the country in droves. Wikipedia says there are a hundred thousand people whose first language is Afrikaans in the UK alone, and a million total emigrants since '94. We are the new hensoppers, the new verraaiers, traitors, the new losers that abandoned their country and people. I’ve always taken my dual national identity as a given, I’ve always seen it as something interesting and beneficial, I’ve never really regretted living in the US or been angry at my parents for leaving. But in the scene where that poor, innocent half-Boer, half-English farm boy is spat at by two girls he grew up with from behind the barbed-wire fence of a camp… For a moment, I couldn’t help but consider whether it was me they were spitting at.
Halfway through the show, the soldiers’ morale is waning and they’re beginning to flip-flop. There have been deserters, and some don’t feel like it’s even worth it to keep fighting. De La Rey, who originally stepped into the war with much more hesitance than the rest, comes out with his motivational speech and knocks them silly. As he walks away, they shake themselves off and begin to sing: De La Rey, De La Rey, Sal jy die boere kom lei? And suddenly, the full weight of the moment dropped in my gut. Here I sat in an enormous, very grand, half-century-old building built at the peak of Afrikaner pride, full of the children and grandchildren of the people that built it. These people all drove in to this place – Pretoria, the capital of the Boer Republics, the very city the whole play was set in – through streets whose names have all just been changed, whose buildings seem old and unkempt, whose founders have fleed, whose sidewalks are now populated by exclusively Black faces, as if it were Apartheid. That particular city – the once-pride and joy of the people filling that room, the bedrock of the history they’d all gathered to hear told – is the one place Afrikaner history might have survived, and look at it now. The people in that room were gathered as strangers in our own country, as a dog after having been hit by its owner, crawling back to the source, as if trying to remember why it started out there.
De La Rey, De La Rey, Sal jy die boere kom lei? A people without a leader, without its own a nation, without a single city to call its own. As we remarked afterward, it’s as if there’s a new war, a living nightmare of redoubled intensity: another cultural war, a psychological war, in which the Afrikaners are being eaten from the inside out by a people that has put them in the place of their bitterest enemy and forced them to surrender everything. And so the Afrikaners relented, and now mourn their losses quietly, for fear of reliving the days when they realized they’d become what they hated most. It’s a bad dream that you never wake up from: an invasion of the same impossible magnitude, but without any ability to stand up and fight. Everything has been taken away, and the people seem to have either faded or scattered.
That’s my Pessimistic Conservative voice. Talking to my aunt about the show afterwards, I reflected that I’m completely unused to being so conservative and so patriotic. When I’m in South Africa, I become part of the very demographic my American demographic looks down upon most. So I’m awared some great opportunity for existential reflection and humble pie potluk. I understand much more, having experienced something like that, why the American South and Midwest tends to be as it is, and why conservatives always seem so negative to me. I also understand much more, having made this connection, what diversity in both societies means. I grew up with a very positive definition of “diversity” that sounds something like “a lack of discrimination;” in the old Afrikaner culture (which is indubitably dying), “diversity” is a trojan horse. Sugar coat the distruction of one culture as a gift to both and you’re sure to get your way. There is something to be said for the unity and belonging that comes with a lack of diversity. I understand much better why some biggotted Texan conservatives might hate Mexicans and Japs and Commies when I consider the similarities.
That all having been said, I’m also able to look past the heaviness of the Afrikaners’ situation in South Africa when I put my Progressive Seattlite glasses back on. For one, after I'd calmed down a bit, I realized I don't have nearly as much room for a dual identity in South Africa, and I have just as much American as South African in me, at this point. In South Africa, I would just become more Afrikaans; in America, especially Seattle, whatever other identity of whatever potency I may choose to take on is celebrated and respected. But more than that, my Seattle lenses give the whole experience a new and much more upbuilding meaning, even for us "traitors." Look how much we're like them: pioneers in new countries, always looking for the best opportunity, willing to become culture mutts for the promise of a new future. But in a broader sense, it's even more hopeful, even more unifying, even deeper and more forward-thinking: look how incredible our roots are! Look how nobly they fought! Let’s be like Mandela and define a new Unity. A new Patriotism. A new South Africa. Let’s see how much good we can take from the other cultures we now live amongst. Let’s encourage all of them to be as proud of their histories as we are of ours. Let’s see how much more broadly we can think and how many more histories we can celebrate. Amandla!!!
Only experience can tell how practical such optimism is, and only time will tell how many of us will even be left in the country to care.
No topic had much greater significance than another, outside of the varying success of Phase Two. I figured that every topic is of optimal importance to someone or other in the world, and so any given topic’s importance to me only depends on how much I know about it.
I did my research. I learned the South African national anthem and some folk songs on YouTube. I read all about the gold mines and the Boer Wars. I knew more or less where the different Black tribes originate from. I knew when my ancestors and the ancestors of the Afrikaners (who, by extension, I supposed were “my people”) arrived in South Africa and when the Great Trek happened and I memorized most of the dirty slang words all the races had for one another. Then I felt accomplished and moved on.
For some reason, De La Rey has been stuck in my head on and off for the past few weeks. Afrikaans folk songs get stuck in my head frequently for no good reason, but this one in particular has been in my head. I happened to wonder to myself a few days ago who De La Rey really was and why everyone loved him so much. Whether the people actually knew him, or if he was just a figure of hope and encouragement. As an afterthought, I wondered whether he was real. I knew the fact of his existence is real, because I’ve read of him online. But in all honesty, he wasn’t much more real to me than Odysseus or George Washington or Akhenaten… Just another name with a set of attributes I memorized, many of which are probably myth.
Tonight, my mother and brother and I met three of my cousins and some friends of theirs for dinner and a musical at the Staats Teater, the State Theater. This particular show, we’re told, already had a long run about a year ago and was called back for a few more weeks this year. For those of you who are Seattlites, the State Theater is kind of Benaroya-like, but with the function of Paramount or Fifth Avenue. It’s in the middle of downtown Pretoria and has been there since my dad was growing up – when we drove through the city last year, he pointed it out to us. All the older signs are in both Afrikaans and English, and it’s quite obvious that in the “good old days,” it was completely white and completely Afrikaans there. It was also obvious, as we got closer to the building, that this particular show was going to be a bit of a throwback to that time.
I’ve been intrigued to find over the past few years that most differences in worldview and doctrine are determined by differences in priority or importance, not actually whether things are good or bad. Likewise, there’s not much I can say to make the American reader say, Hey, I don’t recognize that, in my description of the building and the people and my experience. A Seattlite would not have felt particularly out of place. But just as I feel at home in a certain type of philosophy or theology over others that I more or less agree with, it was just so obvious that I was in a sea of people that were my own people.
I’m not used to that. It’s a little like the feeling I’ve gotten before at school or in online communities when you belong to something bigger than yourself and you feel like you have something important or fundamental in common with other people, but it’s never been on such a monumental scale. It was like everyone there was distantly related to me in some way (which, apparently, has some truth to it, because the gene pool was so small at one point). Like, if my family were in charge of a big production like that, there’s no chance in hell there wouldn’t be a gigantic counter, maybe three square meters, full of white ceramic coffee cups (with saucers) for Intermission. If my family were the whole audience, there wouldn’t be multiple callbacks or encores after the show. If my family had written the musical, it would probably be slightly cheesy in parts, but have very powerful, moving music and be completely sincere. Something resonated in a very simple, powerful way. I’m not used to seeing a full-length musical written in both my first languages in a gigantic room full of exclusively white people that are almost exclusively Afrikaans. I heard only one English –speaking person all night, and she was muttering to herself in the bathroom. The whole crowd defaulted Afrikaans. I told my cousins at Intermission that I don’t think I’ve ever quite realized that the secret code my parents taught us as kids is understood and spoken by millions of people with the same history and heritage as me….. I still don’t think I have. I realize it anew every time I’m placed in a social situation of that sort.
There’s good reason this show’s audience was so thoroughly Afrikaans, and not just because that was the script’s primary language. The show is called “Ons vir Jou,” or “Us for You,” and is about what is normally referred to as “Die Oorlog,” The War. The Boer War, at the turn of the 20th century, is arguably the most monumental point in the history of the Afrikaners, particularly before ’94. It affected literally everyone in the population and in an incredibly drastic way. Almost all our folk songs are from that time, it deeply influenced the next century’s politics, nearly 10 percent of the population died. You know. Big deal. I would say the War changed the Afrikaners, but more than that, big, drastic events like that expose a lot about the existing character of a people. A revelatory milestone, if you will.
The way gender operated in that society and worldview rather surprised me, for one. What I can resonate with as consistent with what I’ve seen in my own family is that the Boers tended to have a much more egalitarian view of gender than Anglo cultures. For the same reasons Wyoming gave women the vote as early as the 1860s, the women on the platteland, the country, had to be strong and had to work just as men had to, albeit in different ways. There wasn’t the same hierarchy or focus on masculine leadership, because the fact of the matter was that both men and women had to lead, and there don’t seem to have been any restrictions but natural ones on the specific content of either gender’s activities.
Patriotism was another of those areas of “revelation,” as well as justice, as well as religion. It’s not that the Boers weren’t patriotic before, but there wasn’t much of an occasion to show it. Life was life. They were just a bunch of farmers that refused to live in the Cape if the British were going to lord over them, and so they made the Great Trek up to the Highveld area around Johannesburg and Pretoria that later became the two Boer Republics: the Orange Free State and Transvaal. It’s true that they waged a few big wars against the Zulus and other Black tribes and won (against unthinkable odds), but those wars were simpler. Nothing since the Great Trek was so bitterly important. Unlike the Zulu wars, the Boer War was a culture war, and it was total war. In the words of one of the girls from Ons Vir Jou, it was as if “our men are strong enough that you cowards need to wage war against the women and children.” And these people were literally my great grandparents. All of my great-grandparents. Everyone was affected. Everyone had to endure incredible hardships to make it through.
One of my Oupa Mocke’s uncles died in a camp. Another was sent off to an island as a POW. My Ouma Nancy’s paternal grandfather was a missionary doctor in the field, and her English grandfather left her grandmother to be taken to the camps as he ran off with his secretary. The history is very fresh. Emotions lie very close to the surface.
There was a speech De La Rey gave in the play, one of those inspirational speeches. I suppose I’ve heard similar speeches in American History (“We’ve done great things! We are a great people! We come from somewhere! We’re going somewhere! God is with us!”), but there’s something about hearing those things said in the language of your mother and father and ancestors, the language of your childhood and your dinner table, that makes it seem so much more true and powerful. There’s something about actually being able to relate to the things being communicated that turns it from Motivational Speech to the communication of a profoundly important truth. Something fundamental. It resonates.
And for good reason. The Boers shouldn’t have survived, or been civilized, or had much of a culture, or their own unique language, or a Parliament, or anything. It’s really something to be proud of. They had a hard life. They fought hard every day just to survive, just to keep their people alive. And then there came a time when this relatively peace-loving, pious, faithful, very simple folk had to think about whether they would risk sacrificing that peace for justice, for a chance at keeping what they (honestly, quite rightly) saw as a greedy, snobbish, disrespectful, and extrinsically-motivated culture out of the society they’d poured so much sweat and blood into establishing. And very reluctantly, but very firmly, they said, Yes, I will defend my right to be here against the most powerful nation in the world despite overwhelming odds. And they won once. They nearly won again. And then their population was crushed and they all nearly starved to death.
A hundred years later, this same population voted a black president into office. There was no real war. Believe it if you will or not, a tiny fraction of the population was actually affected by any violence, especially at the previous century’s standards. White South Africa – the Afrikaners, the very people that, just a couple generations prior, knowingly sacrificed ten percent of their people in an attempt to keep their nation intact – handed over the whole government quite peacefully and has become incredibly progressive in the twenty years since Mandela’s election, despite incredible reason for pessimism. The economy is wavering, AIDs and poverty seem relentless, the news spews out story after terrible story. We have left the country in droves. Wikipedia says there are a hundred thousand people whose first language is Afrikaans in the UK alone, and a million total emigrants since '94. We are the new hensoppers, the new verraaiers, traitors, the new losers that abandoned their country and people. I’ve always taken my dual national identity as a given, I’ve always seen it as something interesting and beneficial, I’ve never really regretted living in the US or been angry at my parents for leaving. But in the scene where that poor, innocent half-Boer, half-English farm boy is spat at by two girls he grew up with from behind the barbed-wire fence of a camp… For a moment, I couldn’t help but consider whether it was me they were spitting at.
Halfway through the show, the soldiers’ morale is waning and they’re beginning to flip-flop. There have been deserters, and some don’t feel like it’s even worth it to keep fighting. De La Rey, who originally stepped into the war with much more hesitance than the rest, comes out with his motivational speech and knocks them silly. As he walks away, they shake themselves off and begin to sing: De La Rey, De La Rey, Sal jy die boere kom lei? And suddenly, the full weight of the moment dropped in my gut. Here I sat in an enormous, very grand, half-century-old building built at the peak of Afrikaner pride, full of the children and grandchildren of the people that built it. These people all drove in to this place – Pretoria, the capital of the Boer Republics, the very city the whole play was set in – through streets whose names have all just been changed, whose buildings seem old and unkempt, whose founders have fleed, whose sidewalks are now populated by exclusively Black faces, as if it were Apartheid. That particular city – the once-pride and joy of the people filling that room, the bedrock of the history they’d all gathered to hear told – is the one place Afrikaner history might have survived, and look at it now. The people in that room were gathered as strangers in our own country, as a dog after having been hit by its owner, crawling back to the source, as if trying to remember why it started out there.
De La Rey, De La Rey, Sal jy die boere kom lei? A people without a leader, without its own a nation, without a single city to call its own. As we remarked afterward, it’s as if there’s a new war, a living nightmare of redoubled intensity: another cultural war, a psychological war, in which the Afrikaners are being eaten from the inside out by a people that has put them in the place of their bitterest enemy and forced them to surrender everything. And so the Afrikaners relented, and now mourn their losses quietly, for fear of reliving the days when they realized they’d become what they hated most. It’s a bad dream that you never wake up from: an invasion of the same impossible magnitude, but without any ability to stand up and fight. Everything has been taken away, and the people seem to have either faded or scattered.
That’s my Pessimistic Conservative voice. Talking to my aunt about the show afterwards, I reflected that I’m completely unused to being so conservative and so patriotic. When I’m in South Africa, I become part of the very demographic my American demographic looks down upon most. So I’m awared some great opportunity for existential reflection and humble pie potluk. I understand much more, having experienced something like that, why the American South and Midwest tends to be as it is, and why conservatives always seem so negative to me. I also understand much more, having made this connection, what diversity in both societies means. I grew up with a very positive definition of “diversity” that sounds something like “a lack of discrimination;” in the old Afrikaner culture (which is indubitably dying), “diversity” is a trojan horse. Sugar coat the distruction of one culture as a gift to both and you’re sure to get your way. There is something to be said for the unity and belonging that comes with a lack of diversity. I understand much better why some biggotted Texan conservatives might hate Mexicans and Japs and Commies when I consider the similarities.
That all having been said, I’m also able to look past the heaviness of the Afrikaners’ situation in South Africa when I put my Progressive Seattlite glasses back on. For one, after I'd calmed down a bit, I realized I don't have nearly as much room for a dual identity in South Africa, and I have just as much American as South African in me, at this point. In South Africa, I would just become more Afrikaans; in America, especially Seattle, whatever other identity of whatever potency I may choose to take on is celebrated and respected. But more than that, my Seattle lenses give the whole experience a new and much more upbuilding meaning, even for us "traitors." Look how much we're like them: pioneers in new countries, always looking for the best opportunity, willing to become culture mutts for the promise of a new future. But in a broader sense, it's even more hopeful, even more unifying, even deeper and more forward-thinking: look how incredible our roots are! Look how nobly they fought! Let’s be like Mandela and define a new Unity. A new Patriotism. A new South Africa. Let’s see how much good we can take from the other cultures we now live amongst. Let’s encourage all of them to be as proud of their histories as we are of ours. Let’s see how much more broadly we can think and how many more histories we can celebrate. Amandla!!!
Only experience can tell how practical such optimism is, and only time will tell how many of us will even be left in the country to care.
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