Another Country

"Well, the Karel Schoeman is a much older novel. It was written in the early 1980s in Afrikaans and it’s a historical novel, set in the 1870s before South Africa existed, in the [Orange] Free State. The central character is a Dutchman, a very refined, learned, late middle aged, bourgeois Dutchman, who comes to South Africa for the air because he has TB. The novel is the process of his dying, and his bewilderment at this very strange African wilderness and strange white society he finds himself in while he dies. And again there is a very subtle allegory going on, which is really about whether it is possible to be white and to live and die in Africa. All the observations about this strange colonial outpost are of things that are out of joint. Well, the priest gives a sermon in Dutch which would embarrass a Dutchman. These white people are losing their language. There’s an orchestral ensemble in the evening and it’s very crude music that would be an embarrassment in the slums of Europe. So, he’s wondering what it means to be white in Africa, whether one shrivels up and loses ones culture and dies or whether something can flourish. By the end of the novel, by the time he’s almost dead, he has developed some kind of relationship with the landscape, which is part spiritual and mystical, but it’s about acceptance, it’s about being able to die on this foreign continent. This was a novel written at the height of apartheid so it’s allegorically about quite profound things for white people. At a very subtle level it’s a kind of acknowledgement that white supremacy is going to die at some stage and questions whether whites can live beyond it. I think it remains an open question in South Africa. I think white culture in South Africa at the moment is very much an instance of global middle class culture. I think that whites are now more migrant and less rooted. Thirty years ago in the census, 60% of whites described themselves as Afrikaans-speaking. Today it’s 40%. The people who were Afrikaans-speaking are now English-speaking and the reason is that people feel less South African and more global generic middle class. Their relation to the country is becoming more tactical and more tentative."