It is July 21 1987 and nearly 100 bellicose protesters from the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging have gathered at Jan Smuts Airport to scream and shout. The objects of their rage are the “traitors” who have just been to meet the ANC for secret talks in Dakar, Senegal. Many of the conference delegates are Afrikaners who are trying to bring an end to the obscenity of apartheid.
Fast-forward two years and the rectors of just about every Afrikaans university in the country are falling over themselves to ban the Voëlvry Toer from their campuses. Their excuses are the killjoy stock responses of the time as they desperately try to snuff out anything with the whiff of sedition — or fun — about it.
Vaaldriehoek Technikon says the performances, by young anti-apartheid musicians, most of them Afrikaners, do not meet the “educational standards” of its cultural programme. Potchefstroom University bans the tour because it isn’t in line with the school’s “Christian values”.
The university apparatchiks, many of whom are likely card-carrying members of the Broederbond, have a lot to be afraid of as cracks appear in the apartheid edifice, driven as much by dissent from within as roiling turbulence in the townships.
As musician Koos Kombuis later told writer Pat Hopkins: “What those of us who were Afrikaans really wanted to do was escape from the Afrikaner tribe instead of just attacking its values. Just look at the name we gave ourselves: Voëlvry. It means, literally, ‘outlawed’, ‘wanted dead or alive’.” (It also means “free as a bird”.)
Voëlvry was a pickaxe into the marbled shopfront of Afrikaner South Africa. Out of it came a movement of people who called themselves “nuwe Afrikaners”, who stood for decency and kindness to their fellow humans and a keen longing to put this country right.
So the blanket hatred and mockery of Afrikaners on social media in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s executive order offering them “refugee status” is about as nuanced as a car crash.
It forgets that poet Breyten Breytenbach was jailed for seven years in 1975 for treason against the white state. The mockery ignores Ingrid Jonker writing about the child shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga, the child who “peeps through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers”.
And it does an injustice to cleric Beyers Naudé, expelled from the Dutch Reformed Church for repudiating any biblical justification for apartheid, and spending the next decades being harassed by the security police and treated as a leper (one of his contributions to the struggle was providing old cars to anti-apartheid activists to travel around the country unseen).
AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel and Solidarity chair Flip Buys, the drivers in this latest wreck, now have a chance to redeem themselves too. They could begin, perhaps, by fundraising for the HIV/Aids NGOs whose recipients, which include babies, will die as Trump’s executive order takes hold.
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