De/Re-Constructing Borders - University of Minnesota

tangibly strained. F.W. de Klerk resigned as Deputy President in June of 1996, just before
the play opened in Grahamstown. De Klerk’s resignation signaled a definitive shift in
political power that was no longer disputable, particularly among staunch Afrikaners. In
addition, the “New South Africa” is comprised of an open field of varied forces who now (at
least legally) enjoy the same rights and privileges. However, it is still a place of enormous
tension, of struggles that happen on a daily basis between individuals fighting for their
economic and social livelihoods.
Set against the context of the new government, Opperman’s play chronicles the life of
one family: the de Witt’s (literally, “the Whites”), owners of a farm named Donkerland. An
epic history play, Donkerland spans three centuries: from the moment the patriarch stakes
his claim on the land at the tip of the African continent; through the struggles to keep the
farm and the hardships of frontier life in the 19th century; to the nation-building of the
early 20th century; the height and subsequent fall of apartheid; and finally, to the present,
when Donkerland is redistributed to its Zulu heirs under the Land Reappropriation
Commission of Mandela’s new government.
Opperman establishes the complexities of the Afrikaner in the opening monologue of
his play, quoted above. His task is riddled with tensions. The search for Truth, Opperman
recognizes, is not possible. He acknowledges the lies and dreams of the past.
Afrikanerdom is trapped within the boundaries of its own formation and––as Opperman
dares to assert––also dreams of being free of those fetters.
The play is five and a half hours long and was staged in two parts with a dinner
break in between. Opperman selects the most common “signposts” of Afrikaner history,
the key events that punctuate the 300 years of their existence in southern Africa. He
captures the mythology and history’s reverberations through the de Witt family’s actions
and reactions to these events. In this way, he views the political through a personal lens.
Early in Opperman’s play, land––complete with all its associations of ownership
and superiority––is established as a central myth of Afrikaner culture. It is important to
remember that central to the Afrikaners’ sense of identity is the myth of being the Chosen
People, favored by God to inhabit and dominate the Promised Land at the southern tip of
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