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

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10 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.
11 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.
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Page 17: 17 Hilary Sapire School of Archaeol

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

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