Beauty in Bastardy ? Breytenbach on Afrikaans and the Afrikaners

Throughout the twentieth century activists in South Africa for the Afrikaans language struggled with, yet never resolved, the language/people, Afrikaans/Afrikaner issue, as Hermann Giliomee points out in his recent ‘biography’ of the Afrikaners (2003, 389). Was the Afrikaner community a racial or linguistic one? Was the push to promote Afrikaans subordinate to the entrenchment of a white supremacist government and ruling party? Was there a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic relationship between language and ethnicity? If the social identity of the Afrikaner was to be shaped by the acceptance of Afrikaans as a public language on equal footing with English, the creed that the language constitutes the entire people (‘die taal is gans die volk’) had to be race-blind.

Afrikaner,' he therefore cautions, 'is the beginning of a discussion, never the final word' (2000,24).
Such discussion is made more salient by Giliomee's more-than-seven-hundred-page study The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, which reveals that the very concept of 'Afrikaner' has always been contested in spite of the predominant sense of ethnic unity (Alexander 2003). The writings of the 'sometime' (Schalkwyk 1994, 24) Afrikaner artist, playwright, essayist, 'terrorist,' and poète maudit Breyten Breytenbach on the Afrikaans language and Afrikaner people further nuance, extend, and even complicate the discussion. In the wake of the acrimonious debate provoked by this self-described 'nadaist,' 'nomad,' 'Afrikaner Azanian pariah ' (1996, 8, 15), 'one-eyed wind jackal, ' and 'philosidiot' (2000, 11) during the apartheid years over the bastard nature of Afrikaner identity (Schalkwyk 1994, 27), what is Breytenbach's 'controversial conception' (1986, 94) of what it might mean, or have meant, to be an Afrikaner and to speak Afrikaans? And in the cacophony over Afrikaner cultural identity (Vestergaard 2001, 22) as South Africa moves beyond the dark legacy, the 'lengthy dismemberment and agony of cultures and ethics' (Breytenbach 1988, 115) of its past and rebuilds itself for a more inclusive future, how can the redefinitive role Breytenbach envisions for Afrikaners and the language they speak be seen both recuperative and reconciliative?

From Bastertaal to the Law of the Bastard
The sense of being Afrikaner had only crystallized by the end of the eighteenth century for the colonists in Southern Africa who had previously referred to themselves as burghers, Christians, or Dutchmen (Giliomee 2003, 50-1). By the end of the twentieth century, however, the term 'Afrikaner' had become increasingly limited and ideologized.
As white Afrikaans speakers, the Afrikaners were that part of the Afrikaans language community forming the ruling class (Wasserman 2001, 37). Described by the philosopher Martin Walser as a 'people on the wrong side of history' (Brink 1998, 72), they saw themselves as a volk. They had a teleological belief in their historically defined role (Reckwitz 1993, 21). They were, Breytenbach sarcastically states, 'a people with a mission, put there by God with a purpose ' (1986, 197); they were to fulfill their destiny Portal Vol. 2, No. 2 July 2005 as Christians, as a civilization (Moodie 1975, 11). They were the only whites in South Africa who saw themselves as having become 'truly indigenous' and who were prepared to fight to the end for white supremacy (Giliomee 2003, xvi). The term, Afrikaner, Coetzee observes (1992, 342), had been first hijacked by a primarily anti-British but also anti-black political movement calling itself Afrikaner Nationalism. 'Afrikaner' thereby became an exclusive classification. Those speaking Afrikaans as their first language however were not accepted as Afrikaners if they failed to meet further racial, cultural, and political criteria.
With the sharply drawn group identities enforced by this eugenically based system (Van Zyl Slabbert 2000, 79), apartheid was intolerant of variation. Just as blacks could be imprisoned for not carrying a 'pass,' white Afrikaans speakers who disagreed with or acted against the racial, indeed racist, policy of the government were seen as opposing not only their people but the will of God. Heretical, these 'bad Afrikaners' could also be judged guilty of treason.
By 1983 Breytenbach no longer considered himself an Afrikaner. He had served seven of the nine years to which he had been sentenced for conspiring against the state-two of them in solitary confinement. For him, the 'concept' (1983a, 6) had taken on a political and cultural content with which he could no longer identify (1986,102). 3 To be an Afrikaner, in his eyes, was to have been successfully 'programmed' by Die Burger, state television, and the syllabi of such cultural bastions as the universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria. It was to be a life-long hostage of the Broederbond, prey to the journalists, teachers, commando officers, and pastors who, he warned, were really 'opinion-spinning spiders ' (1986, 30). To be an Afrikaner, he furthermore opined, was to be 'a blight and a provocation to humanity,' 'a living insult to whatever better instincts [...] human beings may possess and struggle to maintain ' (1983b, 280, 354). As a result, Breytenbach emphasized at that time, nothing could ever bridge the gap between himself and the authorities of the Afrikaner tribe. These 'overdogs,' 'bastards in power' (Linfield 2000-1, 270) were 'tragically defending a superannuated vision of Western civilization' (Breytenbach 1986, 197). He has since come to terms with his Afrikaner identity, however. He realizes that his exiled 'years of dawdling by the fleshpots of Paris' ultimately did not make him any less of an Afrikaner (1996,32). He wrote in 1993, for example, of 'scratching' for his Afrikaner roots again (1993,80).
While not exclusive to them, the first language of Afrikaans is today the 'primary' or probably the 'simplest' means by which to identify members of the Afrikaner tribe from whom Breytenbach so distanced himself more than two decades ago. As such, speaking Afrikaans could be considered their 'most common characteristic' (Louw-Potgieter 1988, 51). In essence, Afrikaans was a dialect of Dutch that over time underwent a limited measure of creolization (Giliomee 2003, 53). It was shaped in large part by those unable to speak proper Dutch (Brink 1998, 76). It had, moreover, been scorned by the English newspaper The Cape Argus in the nineteenth century as 'a "miserable, bastard jargon" […] not worthy of the name of "language" at all' (Giliomee 2003, 203). Likewise, readers of the Cape Times considered it 'mongrel,' 'kitchen,' 'hotch-potch,' 'degenerate,' and 'decaying'; it was only fit for 'peasants and up-country kraals' (Giliomee 2003, 367).
In fact, as late as the early twentieth century, shortly before being codified and elevated by the Afrikaans 'culture brokers' (Willemse 1991, 261) as 'the youngest prince of the family of the Germanic languages' (Breytenbach 1983a, 6), Afrikaans still carried the stigma of a bastard tongue (bastertaal). It was considered the language of the uneducated (Giliomee 2003, 224).
Breytenbach sought to dissociate himself from the 'official' Afrikaans imposed on South Africans during the apartheid years. He long viewed it as the 'excuse and reinforcement for the utter perversion of racial baasskap ' (2000, 10), the 'language for tombstones' (1991,182), and portrayed it in his poetry, for instance, as 'a grey reservist of a hundred years old and more,' with a 'grammar of violence' and 'syntax of destruction ' (1983b, 356-7). But he finds 'astonishing beauty ' (1986, 102)  that Afrikaans, now one of eleven official languages in South Africa but ironically the only language on the continent to call itself 'African' (1988,115), still clearly bears the traces of its 'beautiful, bastard' (2000-1, 271) origins: 'that marriage between the sea, the story of sailors and slaves from many regions, and the inland vernacular of settler peasants and indigenous peoples ' (1988, 15 ' (1993, 211). It should, furthermore, be recognized as dynamic and under perpetual reinvention. It is far richer and robust than the funereal, government-imposed language from which he once distanced himself. 4 Novelist André Brink, for example, observes that at the same time Afrikaans was turned into the language of apartheid by 'misguided ideas of ethnic and linguistic purity,' an 'alternative' and resilient Afrikaans continued to exist (1998,218). Indeed, the distinguished Afrikaner writer, broadcaster, and former newspaper editor Max du Preez noted recently that the language 'has never been richer' (Roup 2004, 16). Readily apparent in the increasing numbers of singers and writers, for instance, who use Afrikaans as a medium of expression, the 'new vibrancy' of Afrikaans (Vestergaard 2001, 27) is moreover celebrated annually at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn, which is attended by more than 100,000 fans of Afrikaans theater and music.
South Africa's 2001 census revealed that more blacks than whites spoke the language at home. 5 This is additional evidence of Afrikaans's linguistic renaissance, of the unfinished, unfolding process of its 'adaptory dialectics of corruption and invention' (Breytenbach 1988, 116), of the 'heartbeat that helped to burst the congested Afrikaner arteries ' (2000, 10). Of course, this may also be explained in part by the fact that Afrikaans was forced on blacks as a medium of education during the long apartheid years. But as a result of the socio-political changes that have occurred in South Africa since 1994, and of the 'concomitant democratization' of the broad South African speech community (Kotzé 2003, para. 27), the language has also lost its 'tutelage, its dependency, its privileged link with the state' (Dimitriu 1997, 87). Today, it consists of, if not embraces and incorporates, several sub-languages, or alternative forms (Adhikari 1996, 14). This development further dramatizes the 'bleeding-in of images of different origins' and the transformation of the result into something totally different. According to Breytenbach (1986, 102) (Oranjerivierafrikaans), as well as various counter-hegemonic discourses and antilanguages (Mesthrie 1996, viii). The Afrikaans as spoken in the countryside of Gauteng is very different from the Afrikaans one might hear spoken by whites on the campus of the traditionally Afrikaans-speaking University of Pretoria. In the same way, popular, or everyday 'street' Afrikaans is as distinct from the formerly 'official' Afrikaans as is the non-standard gangster and black yuppie patois, tsotsitaal-also known as flytaal or flaaitaal, meaning 'smart talk' or 'jive talk.' This dynamic, rapidly evolving and varying creole of Afrikaans, English and black languages such as Zulu and Sesotho, which is widely spoken by males in urban areas, developed in the mines and places such as Sophiatown, to make communication easier among the different language groups.
Similarly, Kaaps-also known as Kapie-taal-or the dialect of Cape Afrikaans spoken in the areas near Cape Town by 80 percent of the Coloured community, and which includes English and Xhosa words, is rising in importance. 6 Understandably, as increasing numbers of Afrikaans speakers find jobs in the media, and as writers from the formerly marginalized groups of the Afrikaans community gain access to production channels (Wasserman 2000, 96), previously non-standard variants are becoming sanctioned and more widely accepted (Kotzé 2003, para. 27).
This diversity in varieties of Afrikaans spoken as a first language in South Africa today results in part, Breytenbach explains (1999, 35), from 'the glorious bastardization' of the 'men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil' who speak it. Just as Afrikaans was spoken mainly by 'coloured' people before attempts were made to wrestle it away from them and consciously transform it into a 'white man's language' (Brink 1998, 106), the name 'Afrikaner' designated mainly people of mixed blood in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. As André Brink notes in a text on the nineteenth century, a sense of national, racial, and religious consciousness arose among South Africans, mainly of Dutch descent: 'from then onwards "Afrikaner" acquired a more explicit political and religious connotation and Afrikaans was deliberately propagated as a "white" language' (1998,76). But for most of the twentieth century, the definitive bastardy of the Afrikaners, considered by Breytenbach to be 'one of the most mixed and mixed-up tribes of history ' (1988, 115), who under the laws of the Dutch East India Company once spoke Dutch and whose members were commonly called baster, or by the Dutch word bastaard (Giliomee 2003, 40), was covered up. As Breytenbach points out, it was downplayed, if not made invisible, by the 'tribe-bound blindness ' (1986, 77) of the governing Nationalist Party (NP), leaders of the so-called 'white tribe of Africa' (Brink 1998, 77).
By attempting to protect the 'fallacious purity' (Breytenbach 1988, 115) (Breytenbach 1993, 27-8) Breytenbach's rhetoric intervening within a rich literary context, he celebrates the South African landscape in an attempt to elaborate on his national self-identification (Foley & Carr, para. 39) through extension. The 'local' stories buried behind these Western Cape toponyms echo and thus include those of all of his bastard brethren, whether those of the seas or sands, slaves or nomads, trekboere or burghers, Huguenots or Hottentots.
The situation, Breytenbach reminds us (1986, 55), is essentially no different from that of 'the pale virgin with the dark-skinned brood.' From the outset, he explains (1986, 189), Afrikaners suffered from the 'rigid sense of insecurity of the half-breed.' But they passionately affirmed the nature and principles of their tribe: Locally non-European blood was mixed in; the blood of slaves, the blood of the conquered ones. Neglected, unsupported and unprotected by the motherlands-until diamonds and gold were 7 There is notably increasing tension stemming from the perception among many people in South Africa that cultural identity can only be linked to African names. See, for instance, Kasrils (2000), Brandt (2002) and Machaba (2003 With their blood estimated to be 71 percent 'non-white' (Brink 1998, 77) and their minds 'warped' by 'European exclusivism' (Breytenbach 1993, 80), they pretended to be what they were told they ought to be ('what they thought themselves forced to be'), with the 'outward and fossilized signs of European ways.' As these 'unassimilables ' (1986, 55) were offloaded onto the Third World, the métissage, or 'new mixture of existing truths' (1993, xiii) began. In the 'mixing'-the suppression of doubt-the bastard origins or non-European colorations were whitewashed.

From Bastardy to the Greater Othering
After Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and the ban on the African National Congress (ANC) was lifted, Breytenbach traveled from France to South Africa. He had not revisited the country since being released from prison there in 1982. Upon arriving, in addition to English he heard German and Portuguese being spoken outside the airport.
What right, he wondered, did these speakers of 'foreign' tongues, these apparent 'intruders', have to strut arrogantly on the tip of the African continent? As they walked their luggage to the parking area, they acted like long-time residents, as though South Africa-with which and from which he found himself schizophrenically identified and dissociated (Reckwitz 1993, 13 (1993,9) One recent tendency in the effort by 'enlightened' Afrikaners such as Breytenbach to negotiate these 'degrees of nativeness' has been to couple an Afrikaans identity with  (Giliomee 2003, 664). The latter appellation was recently invented to designate all Afrikaans speakers, regardless of their race. In the subtitle to his work on the 'tough choices' South Africans face today, Van Zyl Slabbert notably proclaims himself an 'Afrikaner African.' Others refer to themselves as members of 'the Afrikaner community' (Schmidt 2003, para. 7), or in terms of the language they speak at home, as 'Afrikaans-speakers,' 'Afrikaans-users' (Van Zyl Slabbert 2000, 82). 8 With the recognition there have always been 'alternative' Afrikaners and that it is 'normal' to be 'different' (Breytenbach 2000, 18), the 'blueprint' of the Afrikaner has been broken. 9 Yet despite the consequent flux of Afrikaner 'identity,' given the opening up of previously sacrosanct Afrikaner 'enclaves' to all races (Schalkwyk 1994, 43) and the move to transcend Afrikanerhood into a larger whole (Brink 1998, 123), Breytenbach is hopeful that his bastard people will be able permanently to free themselves of the yokes of the past. He believes that together with their South African compatriots Afrikaners can participate in the 'memory-making' of the 'greater Othering,' 'die Groot Andersmaak' (1996,31), the remaking of South Africanness by appropriating Khoi tradition through mixing and 'Other-standing ' (1996, 148). Afrikaners can thereby rearticulate the relationship between subjects and discursive practices, by establishing some form of supra-ethnic or supra-'national' South African nationality or citizenship (1986,180).
They can knit the 'torn fibres' of apartheid finally into 'a serviceable national cloth' (1996,44). Breytenbach sees this self-reinvention as perpetual and ongoing. It is both an itinerary and topography of 'becoming in the making ' (1996, 31). Likewise, it is an 8 For Adriana Stuijt, Afrikaners are really-and only-Boers. They have lost their ethnic identity largely due to the efforts during the apartheid years of the Afrikaner Broederbond, which deliberately wrote their true history from the history books. She cautions that they are at risk today of losing their ethnic identity even further and of losing their rights to remain in the 'unique, ethnically different nation' of South Africa (2004, para. 8). 9 For more on the role of such 'alternative' Afrikaners in the South African press during apartheid see for instance Claassen (2000).
Portal Vol. 2, No. 2 July 2005 'exciting challenge' and a 'miserable fate.' Afrikaners must, in other words, keep on reinventing their identity, authenticity, and usefulness. They must decide upon the weight to ascribe to historical memory. They must determine and maintain the appropriate, sustainable balance for keeping alive the creative tension between sharedness and differences (1996,9).
As a means to supersede the 'maniacal cutting and chopping' of identities (1986, 94) that for so long has been prevalent in South African society, and thereby to move from the early African past to a new African future, Breytenbach reaches back into that past to bring things full-circle. Suspicious of the centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of the current ANC government, he understands that because South Africa consists of strong and diverse groups, is a 'construct,' the 'result of dreams,' and a 'dangerous puzzle' (2000,17), it challenges and tests traditional notions of a nation-state. The definitions of cultural identity that have long had currency elsewhere are ill-fitting and outdated there today (Dimitriu 1997, 86). He recognizes that definitions are 'perforce part-time and shifting ' (1996, 15). In the place of these clumsy efforts to give new ideological content to the label of 'Afrikaner,' Breytenbach favors replacing it altogether.
He thus revives and poetically revalues the ancient term Afriqua, which was the name given centuries ago to the mixed offspring of the Khoi and passing sailors (1993,227).
With the suffix -qua added to Khoi names indicating 'the people, the sons, the men of' (1993,227), this resurrected term conveys the 'true mongrel nature' of Afrikaner culture (Jacobs 2000, 78). It better fits their cultural complexity than an invented, if not stilted, term such as 'Afrikaanses.' Furthermore, to ally Afrikaners and Khoi in such a way acknowledges the 'unwritten' history, customs, and attitudes of the Khoi, the 'invisible presence' of the Khoi in the make-up of Afrikaners (Breytenbach 1993, 211). 10 For three centuries, Breytenbach asserts (1996, 100), his 'people,' a 'profound métissage of cultures,' have been 'nothing other' than Afriquas, or 'of Africa ' (1993, 75). The 10 An anonymous reviewer of this essay suggests that such an allying of Afrikaner and Khoi might be viewed more cynically as a pitting of local ('Cape') against national politics, an attempt to offset the confident majority of 'Africans' and the ANC. See Breytenbach's 'open letters' to Nelson Mandela (1991 and for more on his fraught relationship with the ANC. Portal Vol. 2, No. 2 July 2005 potential value of the Afriqua culture, as he sees it, will lie in the extent to which it allows other cultures to coexist (1986,48). The 'bastardization' at its heart, its engine, can thereby not only give rise to linguistic variation, it should also be looked at closely as a motivation for an ongoing intellectual, cultural, and political renaissance that charts new terrain for democracy, and pushes boundaries or a 'theological, political, ideological, and practical enquiry into the methods and contents of Africanization.' Afrikaners as Afriquas might, as a result, attempt to see where they fit into the Third World, outline their role in the south-north relationship, and determine the nature and trace the results of their reconciliation in this new, more inclusive and revealing cultural context (1996,35).
For Stuart Hall, cultural identity can be seen in two ways: as fixed or dynamic. In the first way, it is viewed in terms of one shared culture, much like the Afrikaner 'culture brokers' viewed their own Afrikanerskap during the years of apartheid: 'a sort of collective "one true self", hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed "selves" which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common ' (1994, 393).
Breytenbach's view that it is no longer necessary to affirm one's separateness in order to fix one's identity (1993, conforms to the second 'unsettling,' less familiar view of cultural identity described by Hall. The supra-ethnic, supra-'national' Afriquan cultural identity that Breytenbach envisions is a fragmented, discontinuous, and dynamic process.
It is not the static, stable framework of meaning to which the architects of apartheid had clung in their efforts to fix the state of being that they had claimed for Afrikanerskap. The cultural identity of the Afriquas is as much a process of 'becoming' as a state of 'being.' It is a positioning towards history and the future, within full knowledge that the schism with the apartheid past is complete yet always already subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture, and power (Hall 1994, 394).
Reconciliation for Breytenbach is also a 'hybridization ' (1996, 35 of people implicitly equates differences of race to those of species and dooms the offspring of interracial couplings to sterility. Accordingly, Young claims, 'the interval that we assert between ourselves and the past may be much less than we assume. We may be more bound up with its categories than we like to think ' (1995, 28).
Corresponding to the 'internal resistance' that a 'complicit postcolonial' offers (Wasserman 2000, 99), could the concept of hybridity articulated, indeed glorified by Homi Bhabha more aptly contextualize the challenges and promises inherent in negotiating, embracing the inclusive, recuperative Afriquan cultural identity championed by Breytenbach? As Bhabha shows in his study on the location of culture (1993), the most creative forms of cultural identity work counter-hegemonically. They are produced in the boundaries between forms of difference, in the intersections and overlaps across the spheres of class, gender, race, nation, generation, and location. They thereby promise to undermine and stifle the cultural differences that, in the context of this discussion, were oversimplified during the apartheid years and forced into binaries of 'race,' into the notion of 'homelands,' and the old South Africa's devastating dialectic of 'difference.' Always relational and shifting, with its meaning and symbols ultimately having no primordial order or fixity, could Afriquan culture be constructed in Bhabha's contradictory and ambivalent 'Third Space' of enunciation? Can the past, racist and exclusive signs of Afrikanerdom be reappropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew in this space, where claims based on a hierarchical purity of cultures might no longer be tenable? (1994,37).
Yet, when tested in the South African context, Bhabha's theory of hybridity is problematic. Given the country's many years of suppressed miscegenation and slave origins (Easton 2002, 243), and its codification of 'hybridity' in the exploitable adaptability of a 'coloured' identity (Noyes 2000, 52), the concept of the hybrid can also be seen as offensive. Because of the specificity of the Cape Coloured community, for example, the concept would at least require further contextual elaboration.  (Nuttall & Michael 2000, 7) Afriquan culture envisioned by Breytenbach.
Like the term 'Afriqua,' or even 'identity,' which is 'a temporary awareness meeting and mating moment to moment' (Breytenbach 1996, 159), Breytenbach's poem, '7.8,' might as a consequence take on new meaning and be revalorized today. The poem was anthologized in And Death White as Words (1978), translated into English by Ernst van Heerden, and published during the apartheid years. Its title suggests temporariness in movement or incremental progress. In rewriting the 'Lord's Prayer' to be more accommodating, Breytenbach's poem seems actually to rehearse the sense of multiple belongings and inclusiveness by which the notion of hybridity might also be revealed as reconciliatory: Our generous God of all that is sweet and beautiful Let thy name always stay stored in us and therefore hallowed, Let the republic now come about, Let others shoot their will away-Let go! Let go! So that we too may have a say, A say like a sea Give us this day the chance to earn our daily bread and the butter, the jam, the wine, the silence, The silence of wine, And lead us into temptation of various kinds So that love may jump from body to body Like the flames of being-being from mountain to mountain Brambles of fire brought to the whitest moon But let us deliver ourselves from evil So that we may reckon with the trespass of centuries Of stored up exploitation, of plunder, of swindling, And the last rich man dies, poisoned by his money For ours is the kingdom, the power and the glory, For ever and ever and just as ever As the shadows and the frontier posts of man When he tears the earth from heaven like a god Ah men! Ah men! Ah men! (1978,65) Traditionally suggesting ownership that is at the same time supreme (the prayer of the Lord) and collective (the prayer to the Lord, the shared father), God's will in Breytenbach's revised version of this well-known prayer gives way to the new Afriquan nation to be characterized by 'love,' by 'temptation of various kinds' (even if myriad bastard births might result), and by the belief in the shared value, the capacities of all ('Ah men!'). 11 This can only come about, however, by giving up supreme, selfish ownership ('Let go!') and by replacing the individual will ('Thy will be done,' 'Let others shoot their will away') with the collective will ('Let the republic now come about'). Echoing a verse from the United States' national anthem ('Oh, say can you see'), Breytenbach asks that the voice of all Afriquans ('A say like a sea') be finally heard.
Belonging to all, rescued from centuries of 'trespass' and 'exploitation,' this land that he prays be 'torn from heaven' might thus resemble heaven on earth. With 'death-white' a phantom shade from South African's past thus replaced with the all-inclusive colors of the Afriquan rainbow, with 'thine' ceding to 'ours,' the divine made part of all menevidence of the refinement of knowledge and insight that is a sine qua non for survival (Breytenbach 2000, 18