Frankie and Stankie (13 page)

‘There are two Marys in the toilets,' she says, but the manager doesn't understand her. Sally's mother gets quite agitated, which causes her to mix a metaphor. ‘Two Marys,' she says. ‘In the toilets. Behaving just like the bee's whiskers.'

Once back in Durban, she reports the incident by way of a humorous anecdote. It's humorous because everybody knows that bees don't have any whiskers.

‘Europe's OK,' she says. ‘But it's nice to be back in SA.'

People in Durban call England ‘home', but they think it's going to the dogs these days, because of all the Marys in the toilets and because of the way some people just shuffle out of the cinema right in the middle of ‘God Save the King', instead of standing to attention as we always do at the Durban Playhouse. The Playhouse has got a ceiling that's made to look like the night sky with electric twinkly stars and it looks just like the Globe Theatre as reconstructed by Walt Disney. You can buy paper cups of that orange squash that always makes your throat close up and, in the interval, there's an organist who rises from the orchestra pit by magic in a swirl of coloured lights. He's there to accompany you while you do community singing by Following the Bouncing Ball. The Bouncing Ball is there to point the lyrics for you on the screen. In Durban the cinema is called the bioscope. That's how it's written down, but everyone pronounces it ‘bi-scope'. Or mostly it's ‘bah-scope'.

Dinah's dad can speak really good Afrikaans because he's spent three years at the University of Stellenbosch being a graduate student. After he'd finished his first degree at the University of Leiden in Holland, he had no money to go on studying there, so he applied for a scholarship at the Cape just because he happened to see it advertised. He knew nothing about South Africa, so he was quite surprised, when the application form came, to find that it had
a box on it where you had to fill in your race. He had no idea what his race was and he had never thought about it before, so he set about finding out all about it as best as he could. He took several anthropology books out of the university library and – since this was the 1930s – he discovered that they all had lots of diagrams of skulls and jawbones, with measurements. For several days Dinah's dad did head measurements. He measured the circumference of his cranium, and the width of the bridge of his nose, and the angle at which his jaw protruded, and the depth of his eye sockets, and the distance between his eyes. He wrote down all the measurements and made careful drawings, using his mother's hand mirror for doing the back of his head. Then he compared all his figures and drawings with the ones in the anthropology books.

‘It was perfectly clear to me that I was descended from the Beaker Folk,' he tells the girls, ‘so I wrote, “Beaker Folk” in the box.'

This is the last of his family stories. The girls have never heard of the Beaker Folk. In fact Dinah has no idea that they could have been an ancient people who got their name from making clay beakers, so she assumes it's spelt ‘Bica-Folk' – but the story makes them giggle all the same, because everybody knows that you're supposed to put ‘European' in those boxes where it says ‘Race', even if you're a white American. Or if you aren't a white person, then you have to put ‘Native', ‘Coloured' or ‘Asiatic'.

Sometimes when their Dad takes them shopping in West Street, where all the glossy department stores are, he deliberately speaks to them loudly in Afrikaans. Lisa and Dinah are always terrified that people might think they are Afrikaners. They try frantically to shush him, but he only says, ‘What's the matter?' He says it really loud and still in Afrikaans. The only Afrikaners Lisa and Dinah ever see in Durban, other than the smattering of Port Natal schoolboys on the bus, are semi-rehabilitated poor whites, their skins orangey and weather-beaten, who do repair work on the railways. Or during the July holidays they see huge up-country farmers with fists like hams along with their very un-citified wives: overweight, plebby types with frizzy perms and strings of barefoot blond children. They've all piled into a beat-up Chev and driven the four hundred miles to the coast to take up temporary residence in the cheap, concrete self-catering apartments on Addington Beach near the hospital.

And new police recruits are nearly always Afrikaners. Young and rural, they are usually from impoverished white sharecropper families who've been thrown off the land by big corporate English landowners. They've wandered, dispossessed and often shoeless, into the towns in search of work and the police force is fast becoming their personal system of outdoor relief. Having acquired drivers' licences, they then roar around Durban in squad cars, joyriding, catcalling women and hassling blacks. It's because the Afrikaner policemen are always so horrid to black people that Lisa and Dinah find it hard to see how much their anti-Afrikaner feelings contain large dollops of class prejudice – and they don't quite see that it's this that their dad is getting at when he does his Afrikaner-speak in public. He's trying to make them hate the sin and not the sinner.

But the sinner, right now, is making himself very easy to hate. Afrikaner community leaders are, at this moment, very busy constructing the cultural heritage of the
Volk
. They are binding together the disparate strands of white Afrikanerdom into a monolithic fighting force by banging away at all the potent symbols. They are preparing to raise up their own poor whites at the further expense of poor blacks. And, since all the imagery of this effort has to do with the Great Trek, Lisa and Dinah find it impossible to empathise with it. They find it alienating. Afrikaners, unlike the frontier folk of the American West, don't have a film industry to carry the imagery of their pioneering effort to an audience beyond themselves. So theirs is an exercise in navel gazing.

So Lisa and Dinah think of Afrikaners as people who, for reasons beyond their understanding, are forever sculpting life-size ox wagons in bronze, or donning goofy poke bonnets and ankle-length petticoats, or growing Rip Van Winkle beards, in order to undertake pious torchlight processions from A to B in full regalia. Along the way, they ritually enact the umpteen battles they fought during their push north from the Cape Colony into the interior of Natal and on, beyond the Vaal and the Orange Rivers. During these battles they have invariably put to rout various parties of black pastoralists. They are powerful believers in their own manifest destiny and praise God, ad infinitum, for his support through every skirmish. As a result, the rituals are always accompanied by the bullish drone of unison hymn-singing, though they are often
followed up, at evening, by a form of socialising that involves massive campfire cook-outs and a form of country dancing known as
Volkspiele
. The
Volkspiele
are undertaken in full pioneer costume, to the accompaniment of a lone squeeze box, or to a sort of hillbilly band known as a
boere orkes
. As cultural revivalism goes, the
Volkspiele
look more fun than Morris dancing, because the participants don't have that look of sissies in anklets on the village green. Instead they have an earthy Brueghel-peasant quality, an innuendo of slap, tickle and incest behind the ox wagons.

For a people in bondage to religious zealots and racist fanatics, there are times when these precious strands of smut seem all that can save the
Volk
from themselves – and Afrikaners have the best dirty jokes in the world, along with a repertoire of filthy and suggestive rhymes; a creative wellspring that lodges in the
Weltanschauung
of Cape Coloured Afrikaners, from whom the new white monolith is busy cutting itself loose. The smut is not what Lisa and Dinah learn about in school when the syllabus dictates that they draw ox-wagon laagers and make voortrekker hats out of crinkle paper – and it is certainly not what comes out of the mouths of those dour Afrikaner thought-police on the radio, the innumerable clerics and
Broederbonders
– but the girls' dad has retained a small repertoire of smut from his sojourn at the University of Stellenbosch and he knows quite a few of the songs.

The Great Trek begins in the 1830s, when the poorer Eastern Cape farmers find that the Cape's British administration no longer suits them. It no longer suits them because the British, along with the more established, wealthier Boer landowners, have by now done all their own land-grabbing, cattle-rustling and coercing of indigenous peoples into pressed labour. They are into the more urbane demands of a new sort of economy, largely to do with merino sheep and free trade. They are keen to free up Hottentot labour to meet the demands of a developing urban economy and they begin to pass laws to this effect. But the poorer Boers on the frontier are, naturally, way behind; still busting a gut to assert their God-given right to undertake unregulated, armed cattle raids across the Colony's borders, and to kidnap the ‘orphan' children of any indigenous persons they happen to despoil in these attempts. So, in dribs and drabs, the farmers give up and pack their stuff into
covered ox wagons and – with much praying, covenanting and rhetorical reference to Moses and the Egyptian Exodus – they travel north in smallish, straggling-convoys, into the unknown.

Naturally, their progress, while often characterised by feats of personal heroism and endurance, is utterly devastating to the indigenous peoples whom they encounter along the way. Desperate black chieftains, faced for the first time with oddly hirsute white strangers armed with guns, buy time for themselves by selling off areas of grazing land that aren't theirs to sell. Or, alternatively, they can wait to be starved out and killed when the Boers lay siege to their villages and co-opt their children as bondsmen. Finally, though the casualty rate among the ox-wagon convoys is not insignificant and some go missing without trace – last seen heading out towards Delagoa Bay, et cetera – the Boers triumphantly establish their two agrarian, God-fearing theocratic republics north of the Vaal and the Orange Rivers – only to find that the worst possible thing soon befalls them. The Transvaal Republic is found to be sitting on a great pile of gold.

The gold means that within no time at all every French and German fortune-hunter, every desperate Polish crook and brothel-keeper, every East European Jewish pimp and gun-runner is in there, jostling to make a quick pile. Plus the British government, which has bigger eyes for the gold than anybody else, is suddenly finding every excuse in the book for why the Boers are not capable of managing the territory, which, for its own good, needs immediate annexing for Empire. The British are also concerned for the rights of their own and other expatriates at the hands of the Boers, they say – and for the rights of indigenous black persons.

Once the British have provoked the Boer War, they find to their great surprise that, after years of pouring in something like six hundred thousand troops from all over the Empire, they have still not managed to rout the Boers, who have transformed themselves into tenacious and highly effective guerrilla fighters. So they resort, instead, to a wholesale scorched-earth policy. They herd all the Boer women and children, along with all their black servants, into the world's first concentration camps and lay waste to Boer fields and farmsteads. In the camps the conditions are appalling and the figures leaking out for deaths from epidemic disease and malnutrition transform Britain into the pariah of Europe. Europe is at this
time, admittedly, committing an ingenious variety of atrocities all over Africa – the Belgians are hacking off people's limbs in the Congo; the Germans are practising their genocide techniques on the Herero peoples of South West Africa – but the British are doing something unique. They are practising war crimes on white people.

Eventually, when the Boer leaders realise that the war is giving blacks the strength to move into the gap and swipe back some of the farmland that the Boers have previously swiped off them, they decide to surrender to the British. They surrender to a crowd of obscenely young and brainy Oxbridge graduates, who are bristling with class arrogance and specialise in waxed handlebar moustaches of almost unbelievable length. The precocious youth are known collectively as Milner's Kindergarten and they are arguably more intensely racist than the Boers, since the Boers carry their racism with large dollops of pragmatism, where the Kindergarten's racism is both purist and visionary. Between them they cobble up the Act of Union and shake hands by selling the blacks down the river in perpetuity. End of story.

The only hitch is that it's not the end of the story after all, because Britain's conduct during the war has made wholesale martyrs of Boer women and children. And this has given rise to a powerful victim culture among Afrikaners which now feeds into their particular form of racist nationalism. For all that they are often anti-Semitic, Afrikaners now see themselves as the Chosen People of the Old Testament. The Promised Land is round the corner, the Boer Republics will rise again and all those rough soapbox coffins that trundled out of the camps bearing the bodies of Boer children will at last be avenged. That is what all the bronzed ox wagons and the tuneless hymn-singing is about. And while the richer, more cityfied English settlers of Lisa and Dinah's childhood are dismissing this carry-on as redneck hick, they will soon be laughing on the other sides of their faces. Because there, at the grass roots, in the rural hinterland, in every Blikkiesdorp and Pampoenvlei, the Afrikaners are staging a comeback.

The Ox Wagon Exodus is even now being commemorated in bas-relief sculpture all over the walls of the newly erected Voor-trekker Monument which has become the major focus of Afrikaner pilgrimage. It stands on a hill outside Pretoria and looks just like a cross between a Mormon temple and a giant art deco radiogram.
All its sculpture is the work of imported foreigners, but then the same can be said of Henry VIII – another nationalist leader who purged his
Volk
of its creative element. So Anton Van Wouw is the Afrikaners' Hans Holbein and he's done a pretty good job. The Voortrekker Monument looks impressive. Plus it's the world's only art deco building that can boast baboons among its bas-reliefs.