Song Wakens Injured Pride of Afrikaners

New York Times
February 27, 2007
Song Wakens Injured Pride of Afrikaners
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 26 — “Proudly South African” is this nation’s E Pluribus Unum, a slogan stamped on products, echoed in radio commercials and inculcated into the new South African DNA. Much as America’s motto celebrates melding many into one, South Africa’s says that it doesn’t matter what you look like — we can all be proud of our young country.

Enter Louis Pepler, who, perhaps inadvertently, has cast the notion of South African pride in a whole new light. He and two friends penned an unlikely rock ballad about an Afrikaner general named De la Rey who battled British forces a century ago, and it instantly became an Afrikaner anthem.

Mr. Pepler calls the song, “De la Rey,” a testament to Afrikaner pride. “I’m part of this rainbow country of ours,” he said. “But I’m one of the colors, and I’m sticking up for who I am. I’m proud of who I am.”

Which would be fine, except that nobody, not even Afrikaners themselves, agrees on what an Afrikaner is these days.

A dozen years after the end of an Afrikaner government that invented apartheid, the mere concept of Afrikaner pride remains an exquisitely sensitive issue among whites and blacks alike. Are Afrikaners the feared Dutch descendants who built an empire based on a belief in their God-ordained racial superiority? Are they just another ethnic group, like the Zulu and Sotho and Xhosa, with a distinct place in the new democracy? Or are they South Africans first and foremost— 2.5 million whites in a stewpot of 4.5 million whites among 47.5 million people — and Afrikaners second, or third?

“De la Rey” has become a vessel for those aspirations and fears and, for the last month, the object of a caustic, often racially tinged national debate.

The seeds of the debate were planted late last year, when “De la Rey” first saturated Afrikaner radio airwaves and catapulted Mr. Pepler from middling success on the bar and restaurant circuit into an ethnic rock icon. Suddenly, at some of his concerts, a small knot of fans began to wave the old orange-and-green flag of apartheid South Africa as “De la Rey” was sung.

Mr. Pepler repudiated them. But the Ministry of Arts and Culture was unpersuaded. Two weeks ago it issued a brusque warning that “De la Rey” was “in danger of being hijacked by a minority of right wingers,” and that “those who incite treason, whatever methods they might employ, might well find themselves in difficulty with the law.”

That drew a barbed retort from the Democratic Alliance, the second largest and mostly white political party. If the government was looking for subversion in a song, the party said, it might well examine “Bring Me My Machine Gun,” the personal anthem of Jacob Zuma, the deputy president of the governing African National Congress and an aspirant to succeed President Thabo Mbeki.

Mr. Zuma and a business adviser faced bribery and corruption charges last year. Throngs of his supporters chanted the song outside their courtrooms, an act some critics called an attempt to intimidate the judiciary.

Since the dispute over “De la Rey” began, a ban on singing it has been issued and revoked at Loftus Stadium in Johannesburg, the nation’s most hallowed rugby pitch; the culture minister affirmed his support in Parliament for Mr. Pepler’s freedom of expression; and Nelson R. Mandela’s personal assistant has defended the song as a youthful cry for direction. Newspapers and blogs have resounded with competing takes on the meaning of its lyrics and its larger significance.

Taken literally, the lyrics are clear: “De la Rey” is a song about Afrikaner history. In the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, a much larger British force overwhelmed the Boers, or Afrikaners, in a scramble for gold and land — but only after Gen. Koos de la Rey inflicted punishing defeats on the British. Nearly 28,000 Afrikaners and perhaps 20,000 black Africans died in British concentration camps during the war, many of them women and children. Their suffering is a central theme in Afrikaner lore.

Mr. Pepler’s song is set in the trenches of that war. In the music video, a blooded and beleaguered Afrikaner soldier sings of “a handful of us against a whole big force” and “a nation that will rise again” — as the Afrikaners later did, winning control of South Africa in an election in 1948.

“De la Rey, de la Rey,” the refrain pleads, “will you come and lead the Boers?”

But while the lyrics as a whole refer to the Boer War, some see in those phrases, and in the soldier’s hopeless plight, a metaphor for Afrikaners’ reduced place in post-apartheid society. His plea for a leader is viewed as a call for resistance to South Africa’s government, which is based on universal suffrage.

Not only blacks have raised those interpretations. “I understand Afrikaans, and I’ve listened to the song,” said Steven Friedman, an independent white political analyst. “It says that ‘we need to follow some sort of general like you,’ which could be interpreted by literal-minded people to be a call to arms.”

Mr. Pepler, 28, a construction engineer from Pretoria, calls that interpretation “totally ridiculous.”

“I’m not clever enough to read coded language in a song,” he said after a concert in Orania, a village of 600 on the fringes of the Great Karoo desert. “It’s such a sensitive subject. You say ‘Boer,’ and everyone is ‘What is this now?’ It’s directly connected to people getting ideas and pictures in their heads — that a Boer is a right-wing person with khaki clothes who wants to murder black people.”

Such people undoubtedly exist; a few far-right Afrikaners were recently tried on charges of antigovernment terrorism. But many more seem to be searching for a comfortable place in a black-majority society and still have not found it.

The Sunday Independent, perhaps South Africa’s most renowned newspaper, says the song “answers a deep sadness” in Afrikaners’ souls, a feeling that they have not merely fallen from power but have been marginalized in South African society — tossed into history’s dustbin, as Ronald Reagan once said of the Soviets.

In its comment on “De la Rey,” the government raised those fears, then dismissed them as nonsense. In fact, better than one in seven South Africans speaks or understands Afrikaans, including many blacks.

But many Afrikaners are not convinced. Students at Stellenbosch University, once the Harvard of Afrikaner enlightenment, have formed a society to preserve Afrikaans-language teaching there. Eastward, in the Indian Ocean province of Mpumalanga, government officials this month decertified an Afrikaans school that refused to teach courses in English.

Afrikaners complain that the government has excised their history, including General de la Rey’s exploits, from official textbooks.

“It’s a continual process of assimilating Afrikaners into the larger population,” said Corel Boshoff, who represents Orania in the Parliament of Northern Cape Province. Mr. Boshoff says his great-grandfather was born in a British concentration camp. Yet Afrikaner history, including the Boer War, has been sidelined to a few sentences in South African history texts, he says. He argues that the language and culture of Afrikaners may be next.

Mr. Boshoff is hardly the exemplar of his cause. He is a relative of Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African leader who institutionalized apartheid as national policy in the 1950s.

Orania itself, a privately owned compound, was founded in 1990 as an all-Afrikaner enclave, a place where Boer culture could flourish free of black, mixed-race or even white English influence. A bust of Mr. Verwoerd dominates its entrance. The town’s 600 residents even have their own currency. Most people would call Orania’s very premise racist.

Moreover, hardly all Afrikaners share Mr. Boshoff’s views. Among intellectuals a school of thought argues that Afrikaners should sublimate their ethnic identities in favor of the larger purpose of forging an integrated South African society, a model for the world.

Yet it is still possible to recognize that it is not easy to be a proud Afrikaner these days. “Not everything we did in our history was wrong and bad and despicable,” Mr. Boshoff said as Mr. Pepler’s band clamored in the background. “There’s also a history of a hundred years ago, which is represented by this song.”