De/Re-Constructing Borders - University of Minnesota

play’s most melodramatic stage moment, Pieter uses his hunting knife to perform a
cesarean on his dead wife’s body. He pulls the male child from her belly and lifts him into
a bright red wash of light as a chorus of Zulu singers chant faster and faster to a climax.
This scene resonates with many elements of Afrikanerdom: the inheritance of a
racist history; an established and revered patriarchy; the secret legacy of miscegenation;
the woman’s role as engenderess of the Volk, or people; the mythology of being the Chosen
Ones; and the symbolic capital of springbok skins, biltong, and Voortrekker heroes. The
baby Jacob is described as “being plucked out of a swamp” (34). That swamp is his
mother’s body, which is presented as a place where male identity is engendered, like the
farm itself that is inseparable from Afrikaner identity.
This tie to the land is developed––and fractured–– later in the play when Mariaan,
the free-spirited and academic-minded daughter, flies the coup for America. She cuts her
traditional ties as reproducer of Afrikanerdom by not staying close to home and having
children. Instead, she pursues a life of the mind, a revolutionary act for a de-Witt (read
Afrikaner) woman. This feeling of self-exile, of seeking “some other place” is a phrase
Opperman repeats over and over throughout the play.
In Part II in the vignette entitled The Salve of Self Glue, Opperman explores the rise
of the official Afrikaner Nationalist Movement and the victory of the Nationalist Party in
1948 (in other words, the beginnings of apartheid). The desire to leave, to break free, is
clearly becoming a tension amongst Afrikaners at the time when their political power is
expanding. The tensions of the social field are manifested through two brothers, one of
whom has stayed on to farm Donkerland, and the other, who has left to seek his fortune in
the city. 7 Ouboet, a Nationalist supporter, has maintained the farm and is the only male
left on Donkerland. His younger brother, Dirk, holds very different political views. He
returns to claim his half of his inheritance after a twenty year absence during which he has
been a teacher in a black school. The intense battle over land and inheritance between
these two brothers, who literally stand on opposite sides of a fence as they speak their
lines, is indicative of the split or rift that politics cause in South Africa and the battle
amongst Afrikaners over who has the right to the land (read here the right to be an
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