Ponderings in the hour of dying

en ek weet
as die dag verby is
sal ek alleen wees
op hierdie plek van verganklikheid
waar my stem eggo teen die klippe
en my oë kyk na die see
vir tekens van lewe
wat nooit sal kom

and I know
when the day has passed
I shall be alone
in this place of transience
where my voice echoes from the stones
and my eyes look out to sea
for signs of life
that will never come

– Breyten Breytenbach

THE Stilbaai book festival on the weekend of February 21-23 was special. Vrye Weekblad has been part of this event before, but we are now preparing for the last epitaph of what once was a living institution. At most Afrikaans book festivals, the average age is too old to be of any encouragement.

Maybe that was why Vrye Weekblad also stumbled, the generation that mulls on words and stories is old and frail, or already dead. What is left of Afrikaans media is Netwerk24, Maroela media and Die Taalgenoot – media where many readers have often wished us dead. Who and what remains? Kallie Kriel, Dirk Hermann and Jaco Kleynhans? They who use language to forge a political plot against the rest of South Africa?

Vrye Weekblad never was a left-wing voice. Sceptical perhaps, sometimes cynical, often recalcitrant, but it almost always carried thoughtful accounts with literary value. Readers' letters were sometimes as good as the work of the journalists. But now, everything said and done, we still have a month in which to celebrate the passing of Vrye Weekblad.

The clockwork tilts

Almost 47 years after I had to read Marié Heese's prescribed novel Die Uurwerk Kantel (The Clockwork Tilts) in standard 9, I finally met her at the Stilbaai book festival. Saartjie Burger was my Afrikaans teacher in 1979 and I have carried her attachment to children and books with me for a lifetime. Die Uurwerk Kantel is a novel of remembrance, and Heese told her mother, Audrey Blignault, upon publication: “Ma, I've been writing this book all my life." Max du Preez and the many journalists and writers who had been part of Vrye Weekblad over the decades also worked all their lives on what the newspaper stood for.

In 2006, publisher Nicol Stassen of Protea Boekhuis reprinted Heese's book with some changes. The patriarchal system of the past had to be modified, as had the master-servant relationship of the time the book was set in. The novel didn't challenge the values ​​of the time, but neither did I when I read it in my late teens. I felt safe with the South African Defence Force in Namibia and Angola, and PW Botha and Magnus Malan in the Union Buildings.

As the historian Hermann Giliomee would later argue, the “slavery" and patriarchy of the past – and by implication of Die Uurwerk Kantel – had to be read in the spirit and time frame in which it took place. But sometimes there might be an ironic integrity in reframing history, as Stassen did, because we can't change the brutal past after all. Because the alternative is that Heese's novel would have to disappear from the shelves because we are now ashamed of who and what we were. Well, some of us. At the time, 46 years ago, things were left to slide in my and most white South Africans' subconscious. Despite all its flaws, Die Uurwerk Kantel was a book with an author that stuck in my young mind.

The sociologist-activist Frans Cronjé opined on occasion that Vrye Weekblad was alienating Afrikaners or perhaps Afrikaans speakers, rather than drawing them closer. The implication of his words was that we had to conform to the interests of a specific identity, we had to rephrase. We refused.

Breyten’s Gelyke Kanse

Over the years, funerals have become life celebrations. The Sunday after the book festival, I drove in the late afternoon from Stilbaai via Hermanus to Wellington for Breyten Breytenbach's at the Breytenbach Centre. In my early student years, as a young, white leftie and zoon politikon I sat at Breyten's feet.

After 1994 many of us conformed to the moderate values ​​of the Constitution, the white socialists of the 1980s were now social democrats. Sometime in the 2000s, Breyten and I spoke on occasion about my quest to get death squad member Eugene de Kock out of prison. He did not let on that he was critical of my actions. I don't know if he had rephrased the past, but he certainly looked at it with the goodwill and spirit of the New South Africa.

But when Breyten became part of the “Gelyke Kanse" (Equal Opportunities) group of language warriors in 2016, he and I had a very ugly public fight. Well, he was probably not formally a member of the group, but he issued a supportive statement as well as published a series of polemical writings in which he emphasised the importance of Afrikaans as a living and changing language.

Giliomee also supported Breyten and Gelyke Kanse. The approving hum of Afrikaans, volkseie organisations that had earlier vilified Breyten as a traitor, was deafening. Suddenly the terrorist was an exile writer, and that hit me in the gut. I was prepared to sacrifice Afrikaans at Stellenbosch rather than advance the cause of Afrikaner nationalism. Today I think otherwise, that was then.

Unlike Heese who yielded to Stassen's wisdom, Afrikaner nationalists would not modify their words in modest acknowledgement of the historical disregard of others' humanity. Even today they refuse to admit that apartheid was a sin against humanity. By the way, my former Afrikaans teacher, Saartjie Burger, is still part of my life and recently mentioned to me that Die Uurwerk Kantel's era has become so unpopular among the volk, that she would not use it as a prescribed text in schools today. 

It became a street fight

Any case. I railed against Breyten in an ugly public letter. The nationalists from Pretoria marched to condemn me, but so did the liberal assholes and sycophantic literati who would do anything to sit at Breyten's feet. There was no longer any question of a battle for ideas, it was a street fight. The only supportive voice I can recall came in a WhatsApp from Max du Preez.

The cheerful, cordial banter between me and Breyten at the Woordfees in Stellenbosch and other festivals suddenly took on a cynical twist. The bloodfight was about the state and future of Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University. It was very difficult for me to identify with the false reasoning of the right. I remember the impossible contradiction in which Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert was caught in 1983 when he had to persuade his party, the Progressive Federal Party, to vote no in a referendum on the three-chamber parliament of PW Botha, just like the Conservative Party of Andries Treurnicht.

Treurnicht wanted to keep parliament white and PW Botha wanted to give the coloured people and Indians representation in the legislature, but refused to involve black South Africans in the process, because that would mean the right to vote. Van Zyl Slabbert knew that the National Party's will would prevail in the referendum, and when I asked him more than a decade later why he did not agitate for an abstaining vote, he mused, “maybe we should have".

The language of tombstones

During the wretched years of apartheid's linguistic nationalism, Breyten referred to Afrikaans as the language of “tombstones". He even gave the impression on occasion that he did not want to write in Afrikaans again, but he did. Perhaps he was of the opinion that in 1996, with the birth of the new democratic Constitution, Afrikaans also deserved to be freed from the cruel ideologies and political scars of the past, and perhaps he was right. But for me there were still standard-bearers for the “brutal past" in our midst and they used Afrikaans for a new national planting.

In retrospect, I suspect that Breyten did not mix up the preservation of the Afrikaans language with language nationalism. He probably thought that if the so-called higher functions of Afrikaans diminish, when it no longer exists as a scientific language, the survival of his mother tongue would be a lost cause.

In the days that followed, Robin Renwick and the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee added their names to the cause of Gelyke Kanse. I began to doubt my understanding of what Breyten was fighting for. Renwick, also known as Baron Renwick or Clifton, was the British ambassador to South Africa between 1987 and 1991, and played an important role during South Africa's transition to democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Renwick was a key figure in the international diplomatic push that ultimately led to apartheid's timely demise. I had no reason to doubt his integrity.

Coetzee's supportive writing for Gelyke Kanse caught me off guard. I could not wrap my brain around Coetzee's backing for this cause. At the time I thought his involvement was simply because he trusted Breyten and Giliomee's judgement. Yet both Coetzee and Renwick indicated that they were concerned about academic freedom, particularly for Afrikaans and Afrikaans students.

So speaking of the Afrikaners; Giliomee spoke one day of an interaction between him and Coetzee, when both were lecturing at the University of Cape Town. Giliomee asked Coetzee about someone: “Is she an Afrikaner woman?" To which Coetzee replied: “Yes, but not in an interesting way." Maybe I don't remember the events exactly as they happened, but that was the general thrust.

I have read all of Coetzee's books and it is not difficult to get the impression that he would be sceptical about a language struggle supported by Afrikaner nationalists. These people were suddenly firmly behind him, despite decades of cynicism towards him. Wasn't it Breyten who said: “Stellenbosch is the mecca of Afrikanerdom, that's where the Afrikaners go when they get stupid."

Back to reality

In the midst of our language struggles and book festivals, ordinary South Africans try to make a living in this sad, crime-ridden country. At Stilbaai I was awakened at three in the morning by friends who had stayed over with me at the book festival, knocking on my door. They had to return to the farm in a hurry, there was an attack, the boys were held captive. The obstreperous younger boy – true to his nosy nature – was hit on the head with a gun, but managed to escape and make a call somewhere. Talking to his father, he was still unsure where his older brother was. In the end, he was unharmed, but what parent's heart doesn't want to break when you hear: “There was a farm attack, I don't know where my brother is." The language struggle does not weigh up against ordinary people's realities.

A life celebration

From Stilbaai I drive via Hermanus to Wellington. I stop at Dassiesfontein for pap and kaiings. At Breyten's life celebration I speak to Antjie Krog. My endearment for her is endless. A year ago we held a book festival similar to the Stilbaai festival in Clarens, Eastern Free State. Antjie receives a standing ovation after she leaves the packed hall stunned with her rhythmical narration. Anneliese Burgess is in tears, and she is not the only one in the hall who had been carried away.

Like everyone at the Breytenbach Centre, Antjie expresses her condolences on the passing of Vrye Weekblad. Writer John Miles says hello and I get an invitation for me and Foeta Krige when we do another slog tour through the Northern Cape. Like me, Miles was a friend of the Namibian journalist and writer Christoffel Coetzee, as well as the ex-politician Wynand Malan.

Chris wrote Op soek na Generaal Mannetjies Mentz (The quest for General Mannetjies Mentz) (1998) and suffered a healthy cynicism. He prophetically told me he planned to sleep through the Y2K moment at midnight between the years of Our Lord 1999 and 2000. And he did, he died on 17 July 1999 in Windhoek. Malan told me from time to time that Miles was sceptical of some of my political opinions, something I pick up on with the greeting. If you haven't read his Kronieke uit die Doofpot (Chronicles from the Extinguisher) (1991) and Op soek na Generaal Mannetjies Mentz, you're damned illiterate. But we have a hearty chat at Breyten's farewell.

Following an eland

In Riversdal I come across the Namibian writer of Agter 'n eland aan (Following an eland), Piet van Rooyen, and we touch base over coffee and a pie. Piet was my lecturer at Stellenbosch in the 1980s. I proclaim to him that the art of poetry is dying away, dying out. Poetry collections don't really sell anymore, even English poems have a very small market. Poetry, as far as I am concerned related to philosophy, is also an art form that has lost lustre in academic institutions.

Piet confirms my fears and claims that the same applies to other forms such as the fine arts, but especially the visual arts. The most famous painters and sculptors still sell, he says, but on the other side of fame the landscape of attention and interest is barren and empty.

While Piet regards the contents of his pie for details, in my mind's eye I read something from Breyten's Om te vlieg: 

kyk hoe braaf is die digter dan
om voort te ploeter in geleende vere

look how brave the poet is then
to plod along in borrowed feathers

Will the language of remembering die?

It's a clichéd argument, but perhaps Afrikaans is not resistant to the attention deficit of our generation's brood. Good Afrikaans schools kick against the times, but at tertiary institutions, Afrikaans has become the language of epitaphs, the classes are empty. The descendants of the Afrikaners are losing interest in their language. Breyten and Gelyke Kanse gave up in the end and Stellenbosch became English. I regret that, the same way that I regret that the recent case of Wilgenhof was not settled more amicably. I wonder if the language of remembering, the fine art of the Afrikaans word, will not die with Breyten, Antjie and Daniel Hugo.

Well done, Breyten, you were right then, are still right, and will be right in the future too.

♦ VWB ♦

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