De/Re-Constructing Borders - University of Minnesota

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only here momentarily. The wheels of Africa turn slowly...slowly, but as surely as death, and one day...someday only a disintegrated little pile of stones will survive, as witness to the little hyphen of humanity, lost in the grass of Donkerland (157). Having established the pathway to Afrikaner identity, by retelling the familiar stories and reflecting the Afrikaner Self on stage, Opperman then poses the troubling and dangerous question: Now what? and places the responsibility for answering it in the hands of the audience: the Afrikaners of today. The tiny trace of vanishing, white humanity has seen its day. Snails hide in their shells, and many Afrikaners refuse to envision any future other than the past they’ve known. Opperman warns his fellow Afrikaners not to hide in their shells or all that will remain is an insignificant trace of white in a dark, donker, land. Donkerland purports to be a play about the fleeting position of Afrikaners in the Dark Land of Africa. Yet while it explores the notion that the Afrikaner’s time has run out––that his hyphen come to an end––in re-enacting his history in an epic play of 5 1/2 hours, it also re-anchors that history. The play conceals its own history-production as it foregrounds history. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, Opperman is (re)circulating symbolic capital (that which is material but is not recognized as such) that for so long has formed the sense of Afrikaner history, truth, and nationalism. In the traditionally anglophone city of Grahamstown, Opperman’s play represents both a crossing point and a line drawn in the sand. The play enters the English-speaking world of Grahamstown, and explores the boundaries of what it means and has meant to be Afrikaners, and what the future for Afrikaners will be in the New South Africa; as well, by presenting itself in Afrikaans, it delimits the borders that exist between English- and Afrikaans-speakers. Within a world where the highly visible, surface borders of apartheid have been dismantled, the subtler, invisible borders of nationhood are asserted through the popular medium of theatre and, particularly, through language. Formerly seen as a language associated with the apartheid regime, Afrikaans is now seeking to disentangle itself from those negative associations and make its mark on the new terrain as an autonomous and valid form of utterance. In a country with eleven official languages, this play reasserts Afrikaans as a language and an ideology. Using the 6
engaging expressiveness of theatre, at the country’s most heavily and widely-attended theatrical venue, Opperman ensures that Afrikaner (nationalistic) interests are being articulated publicly and in a format that both exposes and shields their political implications. The play foregrounds politics in its subject matter but also obscures the political agenda of the play: to re-articulate Afrikaner interests at a time when Afrikaner power is in question. So, does this drama do justice to the complex and dislocated field of the New South Africa, or does it essentially serve a regressive notion of identity as an act of nostalgia? On the textual level, Opperman tackles the multiplicities that comprise Afrikanerdom. He dares to ask difficult and painful questions of Afrikaners at the exact moment in which they are adjusting to a newly-mapped social field in which they no longer wield power. He interrogates the colonial legacy of whites in South Africa by so faithfully representing the past on stage and by pointing to its problems. But on the metatextual level, his play is symptomatic of the state of South Africa after apartheid. It emerged from the anxiety that comes from political and social transition. As well, it is prescriptive: it forces those who see it to ask that “What Now?” question. But in the context of a resurgence of Boer culture, this play is not merely an innocent re-telling of history. The recent proliferation of nationalist groups such as the Boer Journalist Society that was recently announced, the internet-happy Boer People’s Republic, smaller right-wing movements such as the Re- erected Nationalist Party of South Africa, or more powerful and well-known groups such as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, indicate a strong sense of nostalgia and a desire to re-create the mythology of the past, to re-member or re-assemble, a sense of community amongst Afrikaners. Such movements are often fraught with notions of racial supremacy, legitimacy to the land, and patriarchal dominance. My critique of Opperman’s project in no way denies his contribution to “New Afrikanerdom,” nor does it ignore his courage to question so rigid an identity in a public manner. But that he writes a play in Afrikaans, about so Afrikaans a subject, at a time when the Afrikaner no longer holds political power is indicative of a need among New Afrikaners to find their niche in this Bhabha-esque nation of many narratives. 7
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Page 9 and 10: BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. McNeil, Donald G. J
Page 11: 7 The discovery of diamonds and gol

De/Re-Constructing Borders - University of Minnesota

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