Burning the memory

A Change of Tongue by Antjie Krog; Random House, Johannesburg, 2003; pages 376; Rands 180.

THIS is a most unusual book, both in content and structure. The author is a distinguished poet in Afrikaans, the leader of a team of talented and motivated radio journalists who have recorded in words and voice some of the most dramatic moments of post-apartheid South Africa, in particular the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and later wrote an award-winning book on the subject (The Country of My Skull, Random House, Johannesburg, 1998) and, since the end of the Nelson Mandela presidency, a full-time writer. In this narrative, which is about the most accurate way to describe the book's complex structure and contents, she presents a uniquely personal perspective on the change and transformation (the two are not identical) that have taken place and are taking place in South Africa, as it completes a decade of democracy.

Since issues of race and class continue to inform almost every aspect of public and private life in South Africa, a brief account of some specificities of the author's background would be in order. Antjie Krog was born as the eldest child into an Afrikaner farming family in what was then called the Orange Free State (now Free State), and grew up in a farm. This seemingly simple sentence encompasses a whole world of history, geography and landscape, of language and memory, of the smells of fresh crops and slaughtered livestock, of war and defeat and resistance, of parental dominance and oppression and affection and love, of the co-existence in relations of dependence, loyalty and hatred of the black majority without whose labours the white farmers would be less than nothing, of intense religiosity of the Dutch Reformed Church variety and suppressed and rampant sexuality and violence within and outside the home. None of this is easily comprehensible to those outside that specific material and cultural milieu. There are intimations of each of these in this narrative.

Her parents as indeed generations of her ancestors considered themselves as part of Afrikanerdom, a term that has many connotations going beyond merely indicating Afrikaner political dominance and the centrality of Afrikaans language and the Dutch Reformed Church, especially after the victory of the Nationalist Party under Daniel Malan in the so-called `elections' of May 1948, marking the political decline of the English settler class with which the Afrikanerdom has had a complex relationship of contention and collaboration going far back into the years before the Boer war - for the Krog family and many of their kind, quite simply The War.

The one common factor of this collaboration and conflict has always been the enforced dependency status and enslavement of the black majority of the land and their exclusion from any kind of political participation, indeed their `de-nationalisation' as citizens of the land of their and generations of their ancestors' birth. The moral, indeed religious and biblical, justification claimed for this policy barely concealed the more material advantages that the white settler minority, both English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking, derived from such exclusion.

The expression, "so-called `elections'", is used because these were utterly fraudulent exercises whose `electorate' was drawn from less than 15 per cent of the population, and were arranged to be `fought' by the contending and colluding settler colonialisms of the British and the Boer. Though institutionalised apartheid, later known under several euphemisms like `separate development', `parallel development', `multi-national development', `cooperative co-existence' and so on, each trying to cloud its essence which has always been white domination and black exclusion, was the unique creation of the Nationalist Party regime, racial segregation whose most refined form was institutionalised apartheid was a unique creation of the British who, all in all, occupied and ruled South and southern Africa for a much longer period than the Boers.

A Change of Tongue covers only part of this historical and political trajectory, dealing essentially with the process of change and transformation, the key words that animated the advent of democracy in South Africa beginning with the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners and the unbanning of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and other democratic organisations in February 1990. Indeed, the focus is as much on the tensions inherent in this process as on how these impinged on the author and her immediate family, affected her as a poet, a journalist and a professional writer and, above all, as a human being committed to the new democratic South Africa.

One may well ask at the very outset: Why A Change of Tongue? At the obvious level, the title reflects the shift from Afrikaans, the language of almost all her creative work and certainly the language of her verse, to English, which has been her preferred language for prose. This is by no means a unique shift, and certainly does not mark a break from her Afrikaans and Afrikaner roots without which even the most anglicised Afrikaans writer will be less than nothing. Many other Afrikaans writers easily straddle both the languages (and many more), reflecting as much the desire to reach a larger readership as the demands of the market. But the title reflects another more encompassing change, reflecting the ferment in the multiplicity of tongues that mark the South African discourse, though here too the nine indigenous languages, till now entirely irrelevant in the Afrikaans-English conflicts and rivalries, are losing out to English - as indeed Afrikaans too, once the language of the ruling class, is losing. One can think of analogous situations in respect of every one of the Indian languages.

However, the Change of Tongue is more than a shift in the power relations between languages; rather, it reflects the shift in correlations of power itself in all its aspects, sometimes reflected in the use of language. It also reflects the changes taking place internally among all South Africans, using the highly flexible physiological organ as a metaphor for such change.

The tongue is the organ of speech and taste. It is often regarded as a lying entity, concealing what is in the mind. The Bible frequently mentions the tongue as an organ of mischief, vanity and deceitfulness... The retroflexing of the tongue, turning it and back against the roof of the mouth, is a sign of tension... ... . In certain religious penances the tongue is cut or pierced to show the abnegation of sexual activity for a certain period...

Body Magic

The tongue, as an organ of the body and as a metaphor for speech, is all this and more in this narrative.

The organisation of the narrative is complex, constructed with the acknowledged assistance of a careful and sensitive editor, himself a distinguished writer. Structured in six parts, with a prefatory prose poem at the beginning of each part and an extra poem at the end, the narrative demands and succeeds in securing the close attention of the reader. Part One, A Town, is an account of what once was, and what is now happening to Kroonstad, the town/city closest to the farm where the author grew up. The chapter comprises a series of brilliant vignettes, beginning with a hilarious description of the 200 metres race in the Kroonstad district athletics meet, the participants black and white children. Everyone, black and white, young and adult, is cheering the winner, a black boy who has broken a 12-year-old record for the event. Why is everyone happy? The author's white interlocutor replies: "The blacks are happy because it is a black kid beating the whites. The whites are happy because the winning black kid is from a white school and was trained by them."

Welcome to an integrated and non-racial South Africa? Well, the man who is so enthusiastic about the black kid winning also tells the author that "there is a plan in place" to cope with and "control" this new situation. "We quickly realised the most important thing: if we want to keep control of the event, we have to hang on to the announcer's job." This is indeed a splendid metaphor for games people play, a most accurate description of the correlation of forces in the initial stages of change and transformation, with the black majority very much in power and office, but white minority still in control, `keeping the announcer's job'. The happy hilarity of the opening pages hardly reflects the rather more complex process of change and transformation driven as much by necessity to overcome the guilt and hatred of the past as by choice, a commitment to a vibrant and democratic South Africa, where the inspiring words of opening of the Freedom Charter (`South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white... ') have not ossified into sloganeering. Eschewing the `large picture', the author questions and probes at the most basic level of local government: the present status of schools, libraries, water and sewerage (especially the latter), the state of the roads and of municipal services, indeed the very office buildings from where the provision of these services is overseen. Her interlocutors are her comrades with whom she once marched, carried banners, sang protest songs, faced the police, infuriating and scandalising the state and the Afrikaner establishment that it represented, not to speak of her immediate family.

An interesting structural innovation is the parallel narrative, as it were, where the first person singular `I' of the main narrative becomes `she', which sensitively traces the growth of the girl child, the insecurities and desires of adolescence, the growing awareness of her command of words, and of her body. These, structured into very short paragraphs and interspersed into the main narrative, present as a powerful undercurrent that runs throughout the book. The passages where the author describes her interaction with her mother, a distinguished Afrikaans writer seen as much as a role model as one whose example she deliberately, consciously, rejects, even while affirming the strong bonds that unite them. This complex relationship, a microcosm of tensions between parents and children that are universal but in this case informed by unique specificities, is most sensitively treated. Especially moving is the account of the aftermath to the publication of her first poems, and the stern intervention of her mother in response to media curiosity about the anti-establishment tone of the poems that her child was not liberal, that she was not opposed to apartheid.

Parts Two, Three and Four are essentially a recapitulation of some key moments in the first five years of democratic transformation. The TRC, the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Durban, local elections, interactions with Nelson Mandela, including what turned out to be a disastrous (joint) interview with the great man which when it happened made her feel greatly diminished, but now recalled with irony and hilarity. Perhaps these sections, workmanlike in their efficient recollection, could have been condensed further.

The narrative, however, returns to its mode of engagement and passion in the last two parts. Part Five, entitled `A Journey', recounts her participation in a memorable Poets' Caravan from Gorre Island off Dakar in Senegal, the departure point for tens of thousands of slaves to destinations in the New World, to Timbuktu in Mali. The journey that tourists make in relative comfort by air is made by road, train and boat, and takes all 13 days. It is marked by much discomfort even though the participants, all poets from various African countries, are treated as VIPs. As is always the case with long and tiring journeys, and especially so with Timbuktu, the end of the journey and the arrival at the magical sounding city is a bit of an anti-climax. Not so the author's account of the journey itself, not so the evocation of the poetry of Timbuktu as recited by its singers, answering the question that one always asks at the end of the journey: Why Timbuktu?

We are the memory of the Sahel. We are the source of memory. All you have is the voice of the memory, and the imagery thereof. Memory comes to you only in hearing. If we write the memory, we burn the memory. Timbuktu ties new relationships. Timbuktu is the great amalgamator, the collector of north and south, of salt and gold, desert and water, nomad and farmer, buyer and seller, Tuareg and Bambara... Timbuktu is the oasis of memory, of varieties that feed and revitalise one another, comfort and enrich one another, strengthen and enjoy one another. The myth comes from there, the facts from here. The starting point.

Thank you, dear friend, for this wonderful gift, this account of the old and struggling to be born new South Africa.