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

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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.