De/Re-Constructing Borders - University of Minnesota

Situated as it is in Grahamstown and in the recent political climate, Donkerland,
ends up doing more to avow than to dismantle notions of Afrikaner identity. The
audience’s reaction was one of identification, of solidarity-building. The play functioned as
an act of re-iteration, a labor of re-telling, of re-enacting a cultural identity that seeks
affirmation in a political and social climate in which its existence is tenuous. Within the
text itself, the colonial past is problematized––it explores the schisms that exist within
Afrikaner families and political bodies; it questions the assumptions held by the majority
of Afrikaners about their legitimacy and what makes them a people; and it posits a
dubious and tenuous future for the Afrikaner. Yet in its mode of delivery, a mode that
pulls at the heart-strings with its heroic and epic scope, and is so naturalistic that it
seems as if the audience is watching their own families on the stage, it encourages
audience identification with the all-too-familiar images of themselves, essentially re-
iterating an Afrikaner identity. Staged within the tenuous field of the New South Africa,
this play’s existence asserts a strong sense of Afrikaner pride even if the textual battle
within it attempts to interrogate Afrikanerdom and highlight its shame. Opperman
embraces his past and puts on stage characters that are as much Afrikaners as those in
the audience: he literally ‘re-members’ them, gives them substance. He tries to fathom how
they have had to change and adapt to the ever-changing environment around them. But he
does not forget them, for to do so would be to do the impossible: to accept the fate of that
little hyphen of silvery slime in the darkness of Africa. As the Afrikaans theatre world’s
favorite and most prolific playwright in contemporary South Africa, Opperman cannot, and
will not, do that.
8