Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Antjie is one of South Africa’s most important Afrikaans poets. She worked as a journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and she went around the country listening to testimony of victims of apartheid and families of people who had been killed by the apartheid security police. And this book is critical for an understanding of South Africa. She takes you into the raw emotion that exists in the country to this day.
Your next book, Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, is all about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This is an astounding work of nonfiction. Antjie is one of South Africa’s most important Afrikaans poets. This was her first full book-length work of English prose. She worked as a journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and she went around the country listening to testimony of victims of apartheid and families of people who had been killed by the apartheid security police. And this book is critical for an understanding of South Africa.
She takes you into the raw emotion that exists in South African to this day. And in terms of the emotional aspect, in terms of the feelings, the blood, the open wounds, the heartache and hope and hopelessness she expresses, she does it better than anyone else. She does pepper the book with her own reasons for staying committed to South Africa.
Do you agree with her that there was a lack of hope during that process?
I think the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was painted in this book as a failure. I think that it was a very noble effort and the world is still learning from what happened there. I see it as a failure, though, in the sense that white South Africa didn’t embrace it at all. And they still haven’t embraced it. At the time the Afrikaans newspapers were all saying, ‘Don’t blame us, we refuse to be guilty’.
There was a sort of acknowledgement in the English press, but what they were really doing was pointing at the Afrikaners, which English liberal South Africa has been doing for ever. So there is still this in-fighting among the white community today, rather than a collective acknowledgement about what they are responsible for.
Read full interview
Award-winning South African writer Kevin Bloom is the author of Ways of Staying, a journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined. From the murder of the author’s cousin in 2006, to the hills of Zululand after the death of historian David Rattray, from the fateful ruling party showdown at Polokwane in 2007, to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, it is a book that goes behind the headlines and into the marrow of a strange and troubled land. Do South Africa’s whites ‘deserve’ to feel at home in their own country? How does a white person assume a South African identity that acknowledges the past and takes responsibility for the compromised present? Is there a way that the white ‘I’ and black ‘other’ can talk outside, or around, the past?
