This post is part of a series on Afrikaans1 (counter)culture. The first post featured a love poem by Breyten Breytenbach (b. 1939).
At the opening of South Africa’s first fully democratic parliament on 24 May 1994, newly inaugurated president Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)2 started his address by honouring Ingrid Jonker (1933-1965), whom he described as “an Afrikaner woman who transcended a particular experience and became a South African, an African and a citizen of the world”.
He read extracts from the English translation of the poem Die kind wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga, which she wrote in 1960 in reaction to the killing of a black child by soldiers during a protest against the pass laws (which required non-whites to carry an internal passport when entering urban areas):
Below is the poem in full, translated by Antjie Krog and Andre P. Brink3, with my annotations:
The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga4
The child is not dead
the child raises his fists against his mother
who screams Africa screams the smell
of freedom and heather
in the locations5 of the heart under siege
The child raises his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who scream Africa scream the smell
of justice and blood
in the streets of his armed pride
The child is not dead
neither at Langa nor at Nyanga
nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville6
nor at the police station in Philippi
where he lies with a bullet in his head
The child is the shadow of the soldiers
on guard with guns saracens7 and batons
the child is present at all meetings and legislations
the child peeps through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
the child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child who became a man treks through all of Africa
the child who became a giant travels through the whole world
Without a pass
Most of Jonker’s poetry was not political — it was about love and heartache.
Here is one of her most famous poems, Bitterbessie Dagbreek, again translated by Krog and Brink:
Bitter-berry daybreak
Bitter-berry daybreak
bitter-berry sun
a mirror has broken
between me and him
I try to find the highway
perhaps to run away
but everywhere the footpaths
of his words lead me astray
Pinewood remember
pinewood forget
however much I lose my way
I step on my regret
Parrot-coloured echo
tricks me tricks me on
until I turn beguiled
to retrieve the mocking song
Echo gives no answer
he answers everyone
bitter-berry daybreak
bitter-berry sun
Bitterbessie Dagbreek has been put to music many times, including in this enchanting version by national treasure Laurika Rauch (b. 1950), with the melody provided by child actor turned pop star, Chris Chameleon (b. 1971):8
A few years later, Chris Chameleon recorded an album with arrangements of 14 Jonker poems, entitled Ek Herhaal Jou (I repeat you).
His rendition of Bitterbessie Dagbreek is more hopeful than Rauch’s:
The music video for Die onverkrygbare is a good illustration of his playful approach to the rather heavy source material:
I couldn’t locate an official translation, so here is my semi-playful attempt:
The unattainable
I buy a dress of crêpe de chine
with fingers on the type-machine.9
With good food and light dop10
a new friend will soon turn up.
With poems about dust and shame
I buy myself a spot of fame.
Your love I’m able to call mine
with lips red11 and kisses fine.
If only I could through money or power
turn back the hand that tells the hour…
The first four couplets reveal the essential transactional nature of the universe (human relationships included) which Weil called mechanical necessity or gravity (pesanteur). We attempt through art and other lies to obscure this truth with romantic fantasies but these fantasies cannot give us back what we have lost.
Other personal favourites on the album include the eurometal-style My pop val stukkend (My doll falls and breaks) and the wistful Ontvlugtig (Escape) in which she foretells her own death by drowning.
Three months before his death, André submitted for publication the love letters between him and Ingrid, dated from 21 April 1963 to 27 April 1965, less than three months before her death. The letters were published largely unedited in a volume entitled Vlam in die Sneeu (with an English edition titled Flame in the Snow published simultaneously):12
The letters are full of passionate declarations of love, gossip about literary friends and lovers (Brink was married when they met) and quotations from other writers, mostly French.13
The salutations alone tell a story:
Heerlike klein mens, Ingrid, my liewe klein kind, My liewe André, Disseldonsie-meisie, André my liewe hartjie, Liewe Ingrid, André, my vurige opstandige ding! Liewe, nodige Ingrid,
Delicious little human, Ingrid, my dear small child, My dear André, Nettle-downed girl, André my dear little heart, Dear Ingrid, André, my fiery rebellious thing! Dear, needed Ingrid,
My favourite has to be this one from Ingrid: My poësiehonger, poesiehonger kind (my poetry hunger, pussy hungry child)14
Ingrid Jonker’s own child, Simone (1957-2023), was two years old when her mother wrote Die kind wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga and seven when her mother left her asleep one morning and walked into the ocean.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa3c8cda-eadd-4632-9a04-1247daab0de0_354x233.png)
In this confessional,15 Simone tells the story of her mother’s traumatic childhood before turning to her own sad (and sadly predictable) story of being raised by an evil stepmother (“I was not her child”) before being preyed on by wolves and “learning to float with the help of substances like crystal meth” before finding peace by joining a reactionary cult (with Chinese characteristics).
Ingrid was undoubtably a more gifted story teller than her daughter and if we are going along with the aesthetic turn,16 it is probably unfashionable to feel a certain way about the tortured poet’s choice to leave her human, all too human offspring to fend for herself, but I’m no stoic, so, I think about it all the time.
otoh abandoning your 7yo child to go👣 🌊💀is pretty brat
A note on terminology: although the distinction is not precise, Afrikaans is normally used as a linguistic description, whereas the term Afrikaner refers to the people also called Boers (literally farmers). About three-fifths of the dwindling population of white South Africans consider Afrikaans to be their home language, compared to three-quarters of people who are referred to as Coloured (kleurlinge), not to be confused with Black Africans (Afrikane).
I’ve already written about the lack of a Palestinian Mandela, so I won’t belabour the point. For balance, I’ll note the simultaneous lack of an Israeli De Klerk.
Last week’s caged bird Breyten Breytenbach has long been a vocal advocate of the Palestian cause. (In response to the death of Palestine’s national poet and four-decades-long friend, he wrote a cycle of verses published under the title Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish.) In 2002, he wrote a scathing open letter to General Ariel Sharon which was published on 10 April in The Nation, with a slightly abridged version appearing a few days later in The Guardian. The deletions are interesting, especially in the following rousing paragraph:
There is a more pernicious red herring that needs to be smelled out forthwith.It is blatantly averred, again and again, that any criticism of Israel’s policies is an expression of anti-Ssemitism. With that assertion the argument is supposed to be closedand sealed. Of course, I reject this attempt at censorship by thus disqualifying the grounds for debate. No amount of suffering–-be it of the Tutsis,theKurds,theArmenians,theVietnamese,theBosnians orthePalestinians–-can confer immunity from criticism.(And, to put it sadly, no amount of persecution would seem to vaccinate people against perpetrating the same practices they suffered from.) No appeal to the incitement or supposed promises of some Holy Land edicted by One God can condone the exactions carried out by an invading and occupying army– or, for that matter, the cold-blooded massacres of innocents ordered by fanatic warlords in the name of resistance.No reference to some ostensibly sacrosanct“Greater Israel”can camouflage the fact that your settlements are armed colonies built on land shamelessly stolen from the Palestinians, festering there as shards in their flesh, or snipers’ nests, intended to thwart and annul any possibility of Palestinian statehood. There can be no way to peace through the annihilation of the other, just as there is no paradise for the “martyr.”
but tbh since kamala is brat none of this seems particularly relevant anymore
Antjie Krog (b. 1952) is an accomplished Afrikaans poet who covered the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in 1996 for South African public radio and wrote about it in her book Country of my Skull (which was adapted into a film called Red Dust starring Hillary Swank).
André P. Brink (1935-2015) was the pre-eminent Afrikaans novelist of the 20th century (and therefore, sadly, probably of all time) and one-time lover of Ingrid Jonker (more on this later).
Nyanga is a township (an area that was reserved for non-whites) outside of Cape Town. It gets its name from the Xhosa word for moon.
Location (lokasie) is another word for township.
The place names in this stanza all refer to instances of state violence directed against black protestors. On 21 March 1960, 69 people died in the Sharpeville township south of Johannesburg when police opened fire into a crowd of 7,000. The date was proclaimed the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination by the United Nations in 1966 and has been commemorated in South Africa as a public holiday called Human Rights Day since 1994.
An armoured personnel carrier produced by the British auto company Alvis.
I should maybe do a post tracking Chameleon’s Coleridgean transformation from this…
… to this:
tbf it’s been a rough start to the millennium for all of us
A calque of tikmasjien (typewriter)
From the delightful wikipedia page List of South African slang words :
The original mooimaakgoed (literally pretty-making-stuff) is impossible to translate exactly, so I opted to go Swiftian.
The English versions of Brink’s later novels — he did the translations himself — were often published at the same time as the Afrikaans originals.
An emerging theme of these posts seems to be the question of influence (or to put in more romantically: inspiration). So I decided to do a quick exercise based on the helpful index of personal names accompanying the letters to test my hypothesis that l’ennemi of my enemy is my vriend. Below I’ve summarised all the references to non-South African persons, organised by nationality:
French (33): Apollinaire (1), Bardot (3), Baudelaire (2), Chagall (1), Colette (4), De Beauvoir (3), Descartes (1), Éluard (13), Hugo (1), Piaf (1), Rimbaud (1), Robb-Grillet (1), Sagan (1).
American (20): Cummings (1), Fitzgerald (3), Frost (1), James, H. (1), Miller (5), Pound (1), Presley (1), Salinger (1), Taylor, E. (1), Whitman (5).
British (15): Eliot (6), Green (3), Keats (1), Lawrence (2), Maugham (1), Shakespeare (1), , Wordsworth (1).
Italian (10): Da Vinci (1), Dante (4), Di Lampedusa (2), Quasimodo (3).
Belgian (7): Simenon.
Greek (4): Homer (1), Plato (1), Sappho (2).
Russian: (4): Chekov (1), Pavlov (1), Tolstoy (2).
Irish (3): Beckett (2), Wilde (1).
Chinese (2): Seng-ts'an (1), Suyin, H. (1).
German (2): Brahms (1), Schiller (1).
Danish (1): Kierkegaard.
Ecuadorian (1): Andrade.
Spanish (1): Lorca.
There are some notable absences: No Camus, no Dostoevsky, no Nietzsche (although André does quote the following non-dual lines from Seng-ts’an: The conflict between right and wrong / Is the sickness of the mind. // If you want to get the plain truth / Be not concerned with right and wrong).
Speaking of Francophilia, I think the Olympic opening ceremony, notwithstanding the glamourisation of revolutionary violence and the unnecessary queering of The Last Supper, succeeded as spectacle. Gaga’s rendition of Zizi Jeanmaire’s Mon Truc en Plumes was rather tepid, but Maman Céline stole the show with her moving comeback performance of la môme’s Hymne à l’amour.
Afrikaans is a good medium for diacritical hijinks — e.g. take away the umlaut from hoërskool (high school) and you’re left with hoerskool (school for whores).
The confessional is mostly considered a low form of literature, barely above pornography, especially when written by women and homosexual men (in which case it can be hard to even tell the difference). Only when practised by the heterosexual male can it reach the level of high art (St. Paul, St. Augestine, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Nabokov, Roth, Wallace, Houellebecq, Knausgård, Lin).
I’m keeping a running tab in my mind of recent films that appear to support this thesis: Saltburn, Poor Things, Challengers, Bottoms, Love Lies Bleeding… Curiously, girls who like girls seem to be drawn to spectacular acts of violence.
Interesting stuff! The last sentence of this post is the worst I’ve felt about laughing at something in a while