HEILNA DU PLOOY

Traces of Identity in the Mirror of the Past

Introduction

The rewriting of history is a prominent trend in contemporary Afrikaans fiction in South Africa. In the debates and discussions on the narrative texts which take historical situations and events as their point of departure, questions about the relevancy of rewriting the past for the present or the future naturally arise. This essay is based on research done in a larger project concerned with mapping the various ways in which Afrikaans narrative texts, novels and short stories published between 1990 and the year 2000, interact with history.¹ This essay focuses on a specific short story `Our mouth' by P.G. du Plessis² in which aspects of individual and collective identity are investigated by reflecting on the history of three generations of a family against the background of the collective national history.

Background

The story `Our mouth' is set against the background of South African history in the twentieth century and refers to a number of important historical events. It is also necessary to keep in mind the colonial history of South Africa. South Africa was a Dutch colony from 1652 when the Dutch sent a small group of people to the Cape to establish a halfway station to provide passing ships going to the East with fresh food and water. In 1814, at the European settlement after the Napoleonic wars, the Cape became a British crown colony by formal cession. The British officials applied a policy of anglicising the almost completely non-British population so as to rule the colony more effectively and this became one of the reasons for the Great Trek in the 1830s when Dutch settlers moved deeper and deeper into the interior. This can be seen as an early decolonising move and by the middle of the nineteenth century two independent Boer Republics had been established in the northern part of Southern Africa. The Anglo-Boer War (1899_1902) was a war between these two Republics and Britain.

This war was an event of crucial importance in shaping the course of South African history. The Afrikaners who had resisted the anglicising policies of the English governments from the beginning, came to resent the British even more because of their war policy of burning farmsteads and removing women and children (and also some of the black population) to concentration camps. The British believed that this was the only way to counter the guerrilla fighting tactics of the Boers who kept getting fresh supplies from the farms.