1 They Never Wept, the Men of my Race: Antjie Krog's Country of my ...

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They Never Wept, the Men of my Race: Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull and
the White South African Signature 1
Journal of South African Studies 27(4) , 2000
Carli Coetzee
Carlicoetzee@yahoo.com
Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull is a text that, in terms of the audience to whom it is addressed, heralds a new direction
in writing by white South Africans. The addressee of this text is twofold: Krog directs her work at both her traditional
Afrikaans-speaking audience, and at a new audience in front of whom she wishes to qualify as audible. In this paper I
discuss two trends in the text. On the one hand, Krog actively distances herself from her heritage and Afrikaner
background. On the other hand she acknowledges that she can never acquire a voice that does not contain traces of his
past and heritage. The voice in the text is highly self-conscious, with Krog calling to attention her Afrikaans speaking
audience to witness her distancing herself from them. This is done in an attempt to enter what she calls the country of her
skull, a country into which she wishes to be invited by black South Africans. The text indicates that, for Krog, this
imagined entry is as yet not a possibility.
The title of Antjie Krog’s award-winning account of her experiences as a reporter
on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of my Skull 2
(first published in South Africa in 1998), invites the reader to acknowledge the
interconnectedness between the author and her country, the country of her
‘skull’, which is described in terms of her very physical being. Yet in the title,
Country of my Skull, can also be found some doubt as to the author’s claim to an
identification with the country, her country of birth. The fact that she refers to the
country of her skull, suggests that this country is one that is internally created, a
country perhaps of the imagination or of memory. The text bears this out. One
of the recurring themes is the author’s sense of alienation from what she
regarded as her country, the country of her childhood and of her father and
brothers. The narrative returns again and again to her apprehension that she
may not be invited into the new country of her imagination, that which is often
popularly called ‘The New South Africa’.
The South African edition of Antjie Krog’s Country of my Skull has as its cover
image a South African landscape, empty of any human presence. No built
structures are visible; in this sense it is an image unlike those heroic landscapes
by Pierneef, the painter associated most closely with Afrikaner Nationalism, in
which beams of heavenly light bathe the bright white homestead. Yet the
landscape devoid of human presence is not devoid of ideological content, as has
often been remarked. It is a trope familiar to readers of South African writing by
white writers in particular, what John Coetzee has memorably called White
1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented as seminars at the W E B du Bois Institute at
Harvard University and at the Department of African and Asian Studies at Sussex University. My
thanks to Brenda Cooper for her comments.
2 A. Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 1998).

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Writing: the writing which reflects the concerns of a people no longer European,
not yet African. 3
In this sense the landscape on the cover of Krog’s book, a photograph by George
Hallet, can be interpreted using the vocabulary familiar to readers of white
writing, that literature of disembodied landscapes. It is a literature that fails, in
Coetzee’s words, to imagine a relationship with South Africa’s indigenous
inhabitants: ‘Official historiography long told a tale of how until the nineteenth
century of the Christian era the interior of what we now call South Africa was
unpeopled. The poetry of empty space may one day be accused of furthering
the same fiction’. 4 But in Antjie Krog’s work, I want to argue, this landscape
comes to represent something new and different in white writing, and perhaps -
more ambitiously – marks a change in white writing in the sense that Coetzee
defines it.
Krog’s country of her skull is a landscape from which she feels herself barred, as
a white South African, on account of her whiteness, on account of the name of
her father. It is a landscape familiar from her childhood, the landscape of the
fathers and the brothers; but she can never again enter it. And at the same time
it is a landscape into which she wishes to be invited by her fellow South Africans.
But the figure in the landscape is distinctly different from Coetzee’s lone figure
unable to imagine another presence. In Krog’s work, I argue in this paper, there
is a self-conscious desire to address an audience that includes black South
Africans. As I will show in this paper, the addressee of the text is not stable. At
times it seems clear that the text invokes as readers fellow-Afrikaners, those
whom Krog wishes to convince of our/their guilt and complicity in South Africa’s
injustices, as recorded by the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. At other times, the text is explicitly addressed to those whom Krog
invests with the power to allow her into the country of her imagination and heart. 5
The back flap of the Krog text shows a photograph of the author, superimposed
on the landscape, standing at a window, perhaps looking out, her hand touching
its own reflected image. The book, as is well known, is based on the reports
done for the South African Broadcasting Service, where Krog worked under the
name Antjie Samuel – her married name. The copyright of the book is in the
name of Antjie Samuel, the biographical note on the back describes Antjie Krog,
who it says reported ‘as Antjie Samuel’. This divided identity, this double
signature, is more than a case of a married woman making a choice to publish
3 J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (Johannesburg, Radix,
1988), p. 11.
4 Ibid., p. 177.
5 What remains outside the scope of this paper is the reception of Krog’s text by her readers.
This paper forms part of a larger book-length project, provisionally (and ironically) called Going
Native, in which I explore some of the ways in which white South African writing has imagined a
black interlocutor. In this work, too, the focus is not on the actual reception of the work by black
readers, but rather on the effects of imagining an addressee beyond what J M Coetzee might call
‘white reading.’

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under her maiden name (which is of course always still her father’s name). The
nature of the signature in this text points to a series of displacements and
sometimes uncomfortable divisions: Krog uses the work written by Antjie Samuel,
publishing it here under her own name, her other name, but in English, which is
not the language associated with the signature ‘Krog’.
The signature of the text is significant, in terms of the audience it invokes: Antjie
Krog is the name under which the author is known as the adored woman poet of
the Afrikaans tradition. Choosing to publish this work under ‘Krog’, her signature
name as an Afrikaans poet, she manages to invoke the world of her youth, so
often described in her work. The signature thus captures the attention of her
Afrikaans-speaking readers, who are called on to take notice, and are forced to
read this book alongside, on top of, the other work produced under this signature.
Krog published her first collections of poetry while still at school. 6 In these early
works, described in one famous line as “barefoot” poetry, 7 she evokes a rural
childhood in the heart of the country. Her later work shows an incresing concern
with the wider political realities of South Africa. The work on the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission is anticipated to some extent in her 1989 Collection
of poetry, Lady Anne, and in the novella Relaas van ‘n moord (1995). 8 In both of
these texts, the narrator resembles the autobiographical Krog closely. Both
conern a woman, A. (Antjie), who lives in a small South African Town, K.
(Kroonstad) with her husband and three children, and is involved in local politics.
The world evoked is that of a white, Afrikaans-speaking, middle-class family, but
Krog places this family against a backdrop of injustice and the political unrest of
the 1980s in South Africa 9 .
Peggy Kamuf in her Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship writes of
what she calls the ‘double-jointedness of signatures’, as ‘an always divisible limit
within the difference between writer and work, “life” and “letters”’. She continues
that the signature is what allows us ‘to perform, in a more or less reliable manner,
operations of identification, attestation, verification, attribution of responsibility,
and so forth’. 10 A signature, she writes, ‘is not an author or even simply the
proper name of an author. It is the mark of an articulation at the border between
life and letters, body and language’. 11 In this sense, I want to suggest, the choice
of the signature ‘Krog’ is not a cynical sales ploy, as has been suggested by
6 A. Krog, Dogter van Jefta (Cape Town, Human & Rousseau, 1970) and Januarie-suite (Cape
Town, Human & Rousseau, 1972).
7 In the poem “Ma”, Krog writes: “Ma, ek skryf vir jou ‘n gedig/sonder fênsie leestekens/ sonder
woorde wat rym/ sonder bywoorde/ net sommer/ ‘n kaalvoet gedig” (Ma, I write a poem for you,
without fancy punctuation, without words that rhyme, without adverbs, simply a barefoot poem).
8 A. Krog, Lady Anne (Johannesburg, T aurus, 1989) and A. Krog, Relaas van ‘n Moord (Cape
Town, Human & Rousseau, 1995).
9 For one of the very few discussions written in English of Krog’s work before Country of my
Skull, see P. P. van der Merwe, “A Poet’s Commitment: Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne (Current
Writing: Tetx and Reception in Southern Africa, October 1990), pp.131-146.
10 P. Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca and London, Cornell
University Press, 1988), p. viii.
11 ibid., p. 39.

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some reviewers; instead it is the author’s attempt to make explicit the
connections between her life and her letters, between the name of her ancestors
and her work as a reporter on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In Country of my Skull Krog makes more than a few references to the fact that it
is explicitly not poetry she is writing. So she is using the poet’s signature (Antjie
Krog rather than Samuel), only to erase it, to resist it. The book ends with a
poem written by Krog, but significantly in English. The argument will return to
this poem, but here it is useful to quote the last few lines to make my point about
whom the book addresses:
You whom I have wronged, please
Take me
With you. 12
The signature which seems, then, in the first place to indicate that this text is
written for fellow-Afrikaners, addressed to them/us is misleading. A number of
things, including this concluding poem, contradict this expectation. In the first
place, the text is written in English, and has not (yet) been translated into
Afrikaans. Unlike Krog’s other works, it was not published by her Afrikaner
establishment publishers Human & Rousseau, but – in South Africa as well as in
the United States - by Random House (a resonantly named publisher in the
context of this text which is so concerned with cultural homelessness). The book
is dedicated in the following way ‘for every victim who had an Afrikaner surname
on her lips’. This need not imply that these victims are the only, or even primary,
readers; but in this dedication Krog sets up an identification between the
signature (on the cover) and the Afrikaans name uttered by the ‘victim’. The
extended title of the US edition, recently published by Times Books, a division of
Random House, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of
Forgiveness in the New South Africa, 13 gives a more pessimistic gloss to the
original title, and also sets up an opposition between guilt and forgiveness, with
sorrow as the term that possibly mediates between the two.
On the cover of the US edition Krog’s name is smaller, the title bigger; and Krog
is ‘introduced’ by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, award-winning US journalist and
currently National Public Radio’s chief correspondent in Africa. Hunter-Gault’s
introduction adds little that the South African introduction, called ‘Publisher’s
Note’, 14 does not say; its value lies in the fact that Charlayne Hunter-Gault
associates herself with the project, has a similar signature for US readers and
viewers to Krog’s for South African readers and listeners.
12 A. Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg, Random House, 1998), p. 279.
13 A. Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South
Africa (New York, Random House, 1999).
14 A. Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg, Random House, 1998), pp. vi-viii.

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So when an addressee is invoked in the motto, a black woman, a ‘victim’, is
addressed, and the text seems to be directed to a black audience. The author
thus seems to be calling to attention her historic reading public, her Afrikaans
readers, to witness her addressing a black woman; and in this address putting all
the Afrikaans names (including that of her own family) on the lips of a woman
who names them as her aggressors and victimisers. 15 In this sense Krog’s text
attempts to address, simultaneously, an audience that consists of black South
Africans as victims of white aggression, and their white aggressors.
This discussion of the images and the signature indicates that this text can be
seen as divided against itself, doubling up on itself. In this sense its concern with
address is symptomatic of a crisis around audience I find not only in this text, but,
more generally, in other recent texts by white South Africans. It is a crisis about
the name of the fathers, the legacy of the past and of the Afrikaans language;
and a crisis around who the addressee of a text produced by a white South
African could be. In texts like this one, the author is at pains to distinguish
herself from the men of her race as she calls them, and the voice becomes one
in search of a new ear, a new genealogy into which she can write herself;
because for her it has become impossible to speak any longer only in the
language of the fathers. Shoshana Felman, in another context, in her work on
testimony, writes of translation:
Translation thus itself becomes a metaphor for history, not only in that it
demands the rigor of a history devoid of pathos, but in that it opens up the
question of how to continue when the past, precisely, is not allowed any
continuance. Translation is the metaphor of a new relation to the past, a
relation that cannot resemble, furthermore, any past relation to the past
but that consists, essentially, in the historical performance of a radical
discontinuity….’ 16
Hence Krog’s signing of her father’s name, which is also the name of the beloved
Afrikaner poet, and then writing a text in English and dedicating it to the victim
who had an Afrikaans name on her lips, can be read as a powerful statement
about discontinuity, about the inability to continue with things as they were
before.
Near the end of her book Krog describes a return to her family home, at
Christmas time.
15 The UK edition cover raises additional questions around signature and audience. The cover
shows, instead of the landscape of the South African and US editions, a black woman holding
what looks like a piece of earth. The woman on the photograph is Joyce Mthimkulu, and she is
holding the last remains of her son. The portrait used on this cover seems to suggest,
problematically, that Krog is speaking for someone like Joyce Mthimkulu. In the argument I make
here I show how Krog goes to some trouble not to do this.
16 S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and
History (New York and London, Routledge, 1992), p. 162.

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From far I see the eucalyptus trees of my youth, then the poplars and
willows, and then spangled by the midday light the sandstone house like a
honeycomb…. On the gate is a huge notice: If you set foot on this farm
without a specific appointment, expect to be met by an armed response. It
appears in Afrikaans and Sesotho as well.
Jerked out of our memories, we are all wide awake. Surely this has
nothing to do with us? 17
And of course it does not. In this case, the message’s double addressee, the
fact that it has been translated into Sesotho, indicates that the primary audience
is the suspected cattle thieves against whom the brothers protect their families
and herds. But this description of an arrival at the place that is supposed to be
home, but which is barred, resonates for the book as a whole. ‘This is place that
first wakened me for words and still does – after all these years, these many
other voices’, 18 she writes. And then: ‘I’ve written about this farm obsessively.
No other season can heal my words. I don’t speak of it. I call not planets hither.
My being is weak with it, hangs on to it – yet it can no longer come from me’. 19
In a number of recent works by white South Africans a similar trope is used: the
return to the childhood farm, which serves as a way of focusing on the adult
narrator’s sense of the loss of a way of being. 20 These are more than simply
stories about loss of innocence; they are narratives of a dramatic severance from
the world and values of the Afrikaner ancestors, in which the narrator chooses
not to continue the lineage and values of the fathers. Krog’s first chapter is titled
‘They Never Wept, the Men of my Race’, and she begins her text thus:
Sunk low on their springs, three weathered white Sierras roar past the
wrought-iron gates of Parliament. Heavy, ham-like forearms bulge
through the open windows – honking, waving old Free State and
Transvaal flags. Hairy fists in the air. I run across the cobblestone street
– clutching notepad and recorder – to the old parliamentary venue where
the Justice Portfolio committee is hearing public submissions on what to
include in the draft legislation establishing the Truth Commission.’ 21
The narrator seems literally to be in flight from these men, towards the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, clutching the tools that enable her to record what
these men, the unweeping men of her race, have done. The hairiness of
Afrikaner men comes up again and again, as the mark of a particular brand of
masculinity that makes tears (and possibly repentance) an impossibility. In
17 A. Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg, Random House, 1998), p. 272.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 273.
20 M. Rickards, ‘From Innocence to Absolution: Childhood Memory in Post-Apartheid White
South African Texts’ (unpublished paper, Cape Town, 1998).
21 Ibid., p. 1.

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Pretoria, Krog walks past a portrait of one of her ancestors: ‘Magistrate Krog –
thick, hairy-necked’. 22 Coming across a group of Afrikaner men applying for
amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she writes:
It’s them! It’s truly them… I go cold with recognition…. The nightmare of
my youth…. I interview the one after the other in a quiet corner of the
Pretoria Synod hall. ‘You know, your whole body language and tone of
voice change when you are with these men,’ says an English-speaking
colleague. ‘I couldn’t hear what you were talking about, but there is a
definite intimacy…’ I say nothing, When I spoke to them I did use all the
codes I grew up with, and have been fighting against for a lifetime. 23
And between these two scenes, of recognition and distance, comes the anecdote
about Krog, the mother, sitting at the kitchen table with her youngest child who
recites ‘the route of the blood through the body’. 24 She writes elsewhere,
‘Afrikaners are usually versed in bloodlines’. 25 And it is this bloodline, which is
also the line that could connect her to the farm of her childhood, that Krog severs
by writing this book.
It is through references to the Afrikaans language that this sense of severance
and even betrayal is often clearest. The book, written as it is in English, does
not use the language of her childhood, the language of the brothers and fathers –
the men who do not weep. It would seem as if the codes of this ancestral
language speak of another landscape, now rejected by her – and one that rejects
her in turn. She asks: ‘How do I live with the fact that all the words used to
humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart? At
the hearings, many of the victims faithfully reproduced these parts of their stories
in Afrikaans as proof of the bloody fingerprints on them’. 26 This book, then, is an
attempt at a public distancing from the language of the heart, the language of the
men of her race.
Krog quotes her mother, the Afrikaans writer Dot Serfontein (to whom the
“barefoot poem” referred to earlier is dedicated), from an essay she wrote on the
Afrikaner psyche just after the fatal stabbing of H. F. Verwoerd:
And I prayed that my hand should fall off if ever I write something for my
personal honour at the cost of my people and what has been negotiated
for them through years of tears and blood; that I will always remember that
22 Ibid., p. 83.
23 Ibid., p. 92.
24 Ibid., p. 90.
25 Ibid., p. 61.
26 Ibid., p. 238. The original essay by Dot Serfontein has been included by Krog in a selection
from her mother’s writings. D. Serfontein, Deurloop: Keur uit die Essays van Dot Serfontein,
saamgestel deur Antjie Krog (Cape Town, Human & Rousseau, 1992), pp. 62-89.

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to write in Afrikaans is not a right but a privilege bought and paid for at a
price – and that it brings with it heavy responsibilities. 27
Of course this essay was written in Afrikaans, and is here translated by the
daughter in an act of treachery against exactly the sentiments expressed in her
mother’s essay. 28 The quotation from the mother is inserted here as part of an
argument for the necessity of betraying the language of the ancestors, Krog’s
use of it directly contradicting the logic and argument of the original. And in the
way that Krog uses it, she concludes that the farm will remain barred against reentry
by the daughter who has chosen not to use the language of the fathers;
and who has betrayed the legacy of the ancestors. In this move, Krog suggests
that white South Africans who identify beyond the bounds of their racial
classification, struggle to maintain a sense of history, having chosen not to
perpetuate the ‘route of the blood’.
One solution that seems to be investigated increasingly frequently by white South
African writers is to claim another kind of past from that which was celebrated by
the white or Afrikaner ancestors. In some writing by white South Africans, there
is a memory of a time before the white ancestors, a time when the white child
was cared for and parented by a good black mother – and in my argument here I
want to make clear that I think this is a highly problematic solution. In Afrikaans
playwright Reza de Wet’s works there is a strong sense of what she calls a
healing African spirituality, often embodied in a black woman. 29 De Wet says in
an interview: ‘The black woman is for me representative of unconditional loving
[and she uses this term in English, while the rest of the interview is conducted in
Afrikaans] and a nurturing source. But she also represents for me all that we
have betrayed and repressed, and that which could have had such a positive,
saving influence’. 30 One could write an entire paper on this quote, but I want to
point out only the fact of the totalising singular form, and the use of ‘we’, a ‘we’ I
shall come back to in the concluding remarks of this paper.
Another example of this trend, in which white South African writers talk of the
abandonment of their blood lineage in favour of a newly acquired ‘African’ family
can be found in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, about which I have written more
completely elsewhere. 31 The narrative is filled with yearning for recognition by
another mother, another lineage. Malan quotes Breyten Breytenbach saying that
we (again this unproblematised ‘we’ - white South Africans) must give ourselves
27 Ibid., p. 98
28 The 1970 poem “Ma” ends with the words: “ek is so jammer mamma/ dat ek nie is/ wat ek
graag vir jou wil wees nie” (I am so sorry, mummy, that I am not that which I so long to be for
you”).
29 R. de Wet, Diepe Grond (Pretoria, HAUM, 1986).
30 R. de Wet. Interviewed by Riaan de Villiers, Die Suid-Afrikaan 10, Autumn 1987.
31 C. Coetzee, ‘Going Native: Rian Malan's Dream of a Dark Heart’ (unpublished paper, Cape
Town, 1998).

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to the arms of the Great African mother. 32 In Rian Malan's fantasy of belonging,
in the dream of good blood (the full title of the book is My Traitor’s Heart: Blood
and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His
Tribe and Himself), he is recognised by ‘the Great African mother’, and his
divided heart becomes healed in a symbolic process of mutual recognition, the
white and the black chambers of the heart mingling, the family reconstituted.
I return now to Krog’s text to look at the ways in which she imagines her new
lineage, the new bloodline that will acknowledge her, now outside the bloodline of
the men who do not cry. I do this by way of looking first at another text, written
under perhaps the most powerful white signature in South Africa: Verwoerd.
A number of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical texts written by white
South Africans deploy the language of religious conversion. About F. W. de
Klerk the phrase Damascus experience was used repeatedly, to explain his
speech to Parliament in 1992. The fact that the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission was presided over by two religious practitioners, one of them ex-
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also meant that confessional modes were
encouraged. Narratives of conversion can too easily be self-referential in the
sense that they perform the author’s self-absolution. Understandably a number
of these texts have been criticised for being about white guilt, for white
consumption. 33 Sandile Dikeni, South African poet and broadcaster, says in an
interview about the work of Rian Malan and Mark Behr: ‘The Europeans love it. It
pushes the moral high-ground back to white people, forces me to accept that
they’re not entirely bad. They feel sorry, man. We’ll kill you if you don’t forgive.
They’ll hug you to death, and you don’t have an option’. 34 I hope to show in my
last section how I think Krog’s book avoids the self-consolation that Dikeni
satirises here.
In this argument I am less concerned with the efficacy of confession and apology,
and more with the ways in which images of rebirth and new beginnings represent
the counterpoint to the experience of Afrikaans-speaking blood and race traitors.
In the autobiography of Wilhelm Verwoerd, 35 grandson of the architect of
apartheid, issues of names and lineages are, not surprisingly, dominant. The
Afrikaans edition has the title Viva Verwoerd?, 36 the question mark calling into
question the meanings of the name, and the legacy handed down from his father
and grandfather. The book is written in response to Wilhelm Verwoerd’s father
(son of H. F. Verwoerd) cutting off all ties after his son joined the African National
32 R. Malan, My Traitor's Heart - Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness
in His Country, His Tribe and Himself (London, Vintage, 1990), p. 410.
33 A. Holiday, ‘Forgiving and Forgetting: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in S. Nuttall
and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town,
1998), pp. 43 – 56.
34 Weekly Mail & Guardian, July 26 1996.
35 W. Verwoerd, My Winds of Change (Randburg, Ravan Press, 1997).
36 W. Verwoerd, Viva Verwoerd? Kronieke van ‘n Keuse (Cape Town, Human & Rousseau,
1996).

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Congress. 37 In his book, Verwoerd documents his own move from being what he
describes as a son of Verwoerd to being a ‘son of Mandela’. Each of the
chapters bears a title that follows the same pattern – ‘from… to’. The English
language edition includes a foreword by Nelson Mandela, whose signature at the
end of his letter in support of the book is reproduced – as a seal of the author’s
association with him. The book includes a photograph showing the author
meeting the President. Near the end of the book Verwoerd reports a fight
between his infant children and some friends: each one wants to be Mandela in
the game they are playing. In the way Verwoerd presents his relationship to
Nelson Mandela, it is as if the next generation have made their entry into the new
world, where the name of the father is Mandela not Verwoerd.
Yet Verwoerd’s decision to vote for the ANC, and his wife’s election as an ANC
Member of Parliament, is never dissociated from the name Verwoerd. Melanie
Verwoerd belongs to a generation of women who need not take on the name of
the husband, or the husband’s father; yet for both of these young Afrikaners their
choices take on added power, acting as they do against the backdrop of the
Afrikaner genealogy. Metaphors of new beginnings and birth abound in Wilhelm
Verwoerd’s text, which reads in many ways like a conventional religious
conversion narrative. The old life is left behind, the development of the new life
is charted, and there is a dramatic break between the old and the new. In the
conversion narrative, the past is not revisited fondly; for the children of Verwoerd
the past also remains a country to which there is no return.
Antjie Krog’s text speaks of this rebirth in more complex ways. Her text exhibits
a high degree of self-doubt and an acute awareness that a new identity for white
South Africans may only be possible, provisionally, at certain moments. She
writes:
In the beginning it was seeing. Seeing for ages, filling the head with ash.
No air. No tendril. Now to seeing, speaking is added and the eye plunges
into the mouth. Present at the birth of this country’s language itself.
And it wipes us out. Like a fire. 38
Significant in this section of her book is the sense of a new beginning, linked to
witnessing and testifying: first sight, then speech develops. And this
development that is tracked is that of ‘this country’s language itself’. The
language of this country – a language that articulates what has been seen, and
names the Afrikaner violators, she writes, ‘wipes us out’. This wiping out can be
understood in a number of ways; the reading that seems to be supported by the
rest of the text would be that the ‘we’ being wiped out here is an Afrikaner identity
that is able any longer to contain the author. Her past, her alliance, her
37 Verwoerd, My Winds of Change, p. 3.
38 Krog, Country of my Skull, p. 29.

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relationship with the other language, is literally wiped out, and she has to develop
a new language.
The argument will return to questions of language in the next section. Here I
want to focus on an extraordinary set of images that Krog uses to talk about
rebirth. In a context where race, skin itself, is so resonant, the author writes of
shedding her skin. The last section in the text is titled ‘Down to my last skin’. 39
The poem that concludes the text also refers to skin:
Because of you
This country no longer lies
Between us but within
It breathes becalmed
After being wounded
In its wondrous throat
In the cradle of my skull
It sings, it ignites
My tongue, my inner ear, the cavity of heart
Shudders towards the outline
New in soft intimate clicks and gutturals
Of my soul the retina learns to expand
Daily because by a thousand stories
I was scorched
A new skin
I am changed forever. I want to say:
Forgive me
Forgive me
Forgive me
You whom I have wronged, please
Take me
With you
The image of scorched skin is not an innocent choice, in a narrative that often
dwells on the gruesome violence perpetrated by the men who did not cry. It is an
image of suffering, of scarring. But it is also an image that speaks of the desire
to shed the white skin that connects the author to her ancestral shame. Krog
writes of the physical symptoms experienced by those reporting on the TRC; one
of her own symptoms is that her face swells up with a rash:
39 Ibid., p. 275.

12
I am powerless to ignore what vibrates in me – I abhor and care for these
five men [the same five mentioned earlier, applying for amnesty]. I get up
one morning with my face swollen from a rash. My scalp itches so much
that I have to empty a bottle of cortisone on it. The question haunts me:
why do I want to give evil a human face? 40
It is not clear whether the text is aware of the connections between the face of
evil and the author’s own face/skin which seems to be rejecting itself. It is as if
her body wants to negate the identification with the men of her race, to grow a
new skin – scorched, dark perhaps. This new skin will be the mark of having
been born into a new language and a new lineage; it will qualify her to be taken
‘with you’.
It is in this use of ‘you’ that I find Krog’s text to be emblematic of a new way of
talking about whiteness, beyond the often narcissistic and sometimes
exhibitionistic search for absolution, addressed to other white readers. I have
pointed out earlier that Krog’s text is addressed in the first instance to a black
woman to whom the text is dedicated, a victim with Afrikaans names on her lips.
When Rian Malan and Reza de Wet imagine a benevolent black mother who
welcomes back the white child (and I have indicated how problematic a sense of
such a return is), there is little or no attempt to imagine the position of the good
black mother, nor of the potentially displaced black siblings.
Reviews of Country of my Skull repeatedly stress the fact that the text allows the
‘voices of the voiceless’ to be heard, an image that ignores that black South
Africans have always had a voice, that it was the ear that was lacking. Both the
US and South African introductions refer to voicelessness, one of the phrases
that has recurred in almost all discussions of the South African situation. So the
South African editor’s note concludes: ‘Many voices of this country were long
silent, unheard, often unheeded before they spoke, in their own tongues, at the
microphones of South Africa’s Truth Commission. The voices of ordinary people
have entered the public discourse and shaped the passage of history. They
speak here to all who care to listen.’ Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s Introduction
concludes:
40 Ibid., p. 97.
But one of [the TRC’s] certain legacies is the voices, so long unheard, that
now speak for the record about a particularly brutal history. Those who
testified, those who heard them and those, like Antjie Krog, who report on
what they said, are all living South Africans who are struggling to make
individual and collective sense of the past and to push ahead into a future
that may or may not fulfil the promise left by those first-time voters in
1994. The Truth Commission, no more perfect than the messy work-inprogress
called democracy, allowed them to face together, for the first
time, the first task.

13
And Hunter-Gault’s signature places her in Johannesburg, South Africa; as the
interpreter of Krog’s signature for her US audience.
It would be easy for a white journalist to imagine herself, heroically, giving voice
to the voiceless. Krog, I argue here, does not do this. Throughout the book,
instead, she seems to be concerned with the question of what kind of voice she
is allowed to have, how many layers of skin and identity she will need to shed
before she is audible. She writes of her sense of imprisonment by her name,
her race, her lineage:
And suddenly it is as if an undertow is taking me out… out… and out. And
behind me sinks the country of my skull like a sheet in the dark – and I
hear a thin song, hooves, hedges of venom, fever and destruction
fermenting and hissing underwater. I shrink and prickle. Against. Against
my blood and the heritage thereof. Will I forever be them – recognising
them as I do daily in my nostrils? Yes. And what we have done will never
be undone. It doesn’t matter what we do. 41
This is not the ‘we’ that Reza de Wet uses innocently and naively, unaware of the
exclusions effected by it it; this is a ‘we’ that speaks of being divided against
itself, a ‘we’ that when it speaks of itself speaks as of the horsemen of the
Apocalypse. A similar sentiment is expressed in a scene where the author
describes being caught out as part of that ‘we’, which excludes her from a sense
of sharing in another ‘we’:
The proceedings are concluded with the anthem. I stand, caught
unawares by the Sesotho version and the knowledge that I am white, that
I have to reacquaint myself with this land, that my language carries
violence as a voice, that I can do nothing about it, that after so many years
I still feel uneasy with what is mine, with what is me.
But then the passage continues, more hopefully:
The woman next to me looks surprised when I sing the Free State version
of ‘Nkosi’ [Krog speaks some Sesotho]. She smiles, holds her head close
to mine and shifts to the alto part. The song leader opens the melody to
us. The sopranos envelop, the bass voices support…. And I wade into
song – in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is
fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering
there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape, all of us,
can come to rest. 42
41 Country of my Skull, pp. 130 – 131.
42 Ibid., pp. 216 – 217.

14
It is through the song, through singing in a language other than the language of
the Afrikaner ancestors, that Krog seems to find a new way of saying, tentatively,
‘we’. Working as a reporter on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
provides an opportunity to imagine herself part of another collective ‘we’. When
the victims’ hearings are over, she writes: ‘And I miss the microphones and
translation earphones…. For me, the Truth Commission microphone with its little
red light was the ultimate symbol of the whole process: here the marginalized
voice speaks to the public ear, the unspeakable is spoken – and translated – the
personal story brought from the innermost depths of the individual binds us anew
to the collective.’ 43 But there is no easy way into this collective:
Ah, the Commission! The deepest hear of my heart. Heart that can only
come from this soil – brave – with its teeth firmly in the jugular of the only
truth that matters. And that heart is black. I belong to that blinding black
African heart. My throat floats up in tears – my pen falls to the floor, I
blubber behind my hand, my glasses fog up – for one brief, shimmering
moment this country, this country is also truly mine. 44
It is in the moment when her body seems to break down in tears, distinguishes
itself from the men of her race who do not weep, that – for a moment – Krog is
able to imagine herself connected to the country and able to say ‘we’, ‘ours’,
‘mine’, to feel that she belongs to a black heart – is loved by a black heart.
What is perhaps most valuable about Krog’s book is her attempt to speak about
whiteness, but not simply to whites. The awareness of the significance of
address and imagined audience has become an important strand in what is
sometimes called “white studies”. 45 Toni Morrison writes in her influential Playing
in the Dark: “My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object
to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and
imaginers”. 46 As many have pointed out, though, paying attention once again to
whites may serve to strengthen rather than undermine the centrality of
whiteness. A particular kind of attention must be paid to whiteness, and what the
nature of this attention ought to be has been the focus of much of the work
produced in the field.
A number of academic studies of whiteness have focused on the desire of whites
to be or become black, while the phenomenon of whites in blackface remains a
43 Ibid., p. 237.
44 Ibid., p. 239.
45 For two early literature overviews of this rapidly growing area see A. Bonnet, ‘White Studies:
The Problems and Projects of a New Research Agenda’ (Theory, Culture & Society 13(2), 1996),
pp. 145-55 and D. Stow, ‘Uncolored People’ (Lingua Franca 6(6), 1996, pp. 68-81. A number of
anthologies on whiteness have appeared, among them M. Hill (ed.), Whiteness: a Critical Reader
(New York/London, New York University Press, 1997) and R. Delgado and J. Stefanic (eds.),
Critical White Studies (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1997).
46 T. Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992), p. xii.

15
popular media topic. 47 This cross-over is often applauded (typically by fellowwhites),
but Diana Fuss in her Identification Papers points out the possible
dangers of such forms of identification: “If the mimicry of subjugation can provide
unexpected opportunities for resistance and disruption, the mimicry of subversion
can find itself reinforcing conventional power relations rather than eroding them. 48
White speech in the sense that I want to employ it is speech that is constructed
around a yearning – not the yearning in any simple way to be black, but the
yearning to qualify for a black audience. In Richard Dyer’s White, to quote one
famous example, the terminology used in this regard is revealing. Dyer writes
them/us when speaking of whites and whiteness, hereby showing that his
primary concern is not with whites like himself. He writes:
The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the
position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and
sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with
which they/we speak in and on the world. 49
The distinction I draw in the discussion here, and more completely in my
forthcoming book, 50 is between, on the one hand, wanting to be black (an option -
problematic in many ways - that some white writers in South Africa, as
elsewhere, pursue); and, on the other hand, wanting to be heard and
acknowledged by a black audience. For Krog this means to be allowed to
address fellow South Africans, to speak self-consciously not only to the white
fathers. In this, then, lies the coincidence between whiteness and guilt that is
central to so many of the studies of whiteness proliferating in the UK and the US
at the moment: it is speech that, at its best, is not innocent of the knowledge that
it is interpreting, reporting, witnessing about being white to an audience for whom
whiteness may well be a marginal concern. 51
As argued earlier, the audience that Krog’s book invokes is not a unitary one.
She is speaking to black South Africans, explicitly in front of (and thus also to)
fellow-whites, but not only to them/us. So the text remains aware that the
brothers and the fathers are watching, but it does not address them exclusively,
nor does it use the language of the Afrikaner ancestors. The men who did not cry
have to listen, but listen also to the daughter addressing someone beyond them.
47 See for example S. Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New
York/Oxford, Oxford University Press).
48 D. Fuss, Identification Papers (New York/London, Routledge, 1995), p. 147.
49 R. Dyer, White (London and New York, Routledge, 1997), p. 2.
50 Provisionally called Going Native, the book is a study of white South Africans’ relationship with
and claim to an African identity. In my book I argue that an awareness of questions of audience
and address is crucial to such an identification.
51 See for example Dyer, White, p. 2-11 and Gubar, Racechanges, pp. xvii-xx. An extreme
example of the identification between whiteness and guilt is to be found in the journal Race
Traitor: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity, which advocates that whites renounce their
race.

In this way Krog’s book points the way to new directions in ‘white writing’, but it
does so fully aware of the limitations and contradictions in such a move. And
this, I argue, is why Antjie Krog uses her Afrikaans signature, writes selfconsciously
using the names of the ancestors, emphasising that the time of the
white fathers is over, but that there is no way of escaping their legacy.
16

17
Hilary Sapire
School of Archaeology and Classics
Birkbeck College
University of London
Malet St
London WC1E 7HX
108 Southmoor Road
Oxford OX2 6RB
November 2000
Dear Hilary Sapire
Here is the rewritten version of the paper I submitted in March of this year. I
have made the changes suggested by the readers.
Regards
Carli