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Boer kultur: HKZ visits his (very distant) family
mit PROFESSOR HANS KNEESENBOOM-ZEDEYSIE
Friday, February 15, 2008
I must beguine by making apologies for my absence last week. I have been visiting
my relatives in South Africa and, as you might infer from what follows, electronic
communications were somewhere betweën few und far.
English visitors to South Africa are forever confounded by persistent references to
half the white population as being ‘Dutch’. This is ironic, since here in Holland we in
fact have a poor track record when it comes to recognising our shared cultural
heritage with our Afrikaans cousins.
This has long been a source of intellectual and ethical discomfort for me, so I
begged 10 days’ leave from my teaching duties and persuaded the European
Commission’s education committee to provide some funding for me to launch the
inaugural Dutch-‘Dutch’ Friendship Conference.*
This decision had nothing whatever to do with the fact that February is a superb
time of year to visit South Africa (the ‘Beau Kaap’ is especially beau this time of year,
if you’re down south), nor the fact that the airline of my choice just happened to
route through Accra, where my old college friend and footsie team-mate, Otto
Pfister, was steering the Ghanaian team to a perfectly respectable third place in the
Africa(n) Cup of Nations.
It was, of course, a terrible pity that none of my UvGF colleagues received their
Conference invitations in time to attend. Aber, someone had to stay behind and
cover my classes. The third years on the Intermediary Mediations and Middling
Mittle-Europeans Medians course have an exam in three weeks.
And so it was that, last Monday, I found myself alone, in the thriving South African
metropolis of Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein.
Now, anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of Dutch/Afrikaans will
know that this means ‘the place where the two buffaloes were killed stone dead
with one shot: that place there, where the spring is’. The difficulty arises, if at all,
only in the pronunciation (and because, even within South Africa, many people
belief the town to be fictional).
To the locals, however, for ease and because life is zu kurtz, it is known simply as
‘Tweebuffels…’ So, here are my findings from my stay in Tweebuffels…
Language
Afrikaners speak in a manner surprisingly reminiscent of the Russian Ambassador in
The Hunt for Red October. Linguistic experts have put forward various theories to
explain this, none of which have dealt sufficiently with the underlying irony that the
Afrikaans have always had a visceral hatred of all things Soviet.
The Afrikaans language includes the word arslikhan. It is, as you say, exactly what it
says on the can. It is also very useful when reviewing excessively-flattering
biographies of African politicians.
I also kept hearing a word that sounded startlingly like ‘kaffir’. For an entire week I
was terrified about confessing that, back home, I am actually on first name terms
with several black people, none of whom are my employees (though many of them
are employed, especially in the Jamaican Naughty Cookie House round the corner
from the Universiteit). In the end, though, ‘kaffir’ turned out to be ‘kiff, eh?’, a
phrase meaning something similar to the German ‘über-cool’ or the French ‘hyper-
chouette!’ Very odd.
Nomenclature
Afrikaners not named after towns (men called Pieter are named for Pietersburg, eg)
are generally named after flowers, rock-formations or biblical characters. The latter
two varieties tend to have beards to match, regardless of gender.
Mercifully, no-one has been named after Tweebuffels(…). Yet.
Politics
Tweebuffels has a system of government controlled by an honorary tribal chief. The
current incumbent is a farmer (natürlich) by the name of Os du Randt. During my
preliminary researches for this junket I made enquiries regarding Chief Os, and was
told that he was very friendly but that I ought not to look him in the eye for too long
because he was ‘twice the man you are’.
I have subsequently discovered this to be literally true. I went to a braai
(barbecue/abattoir auction) at his house and, stumbling through the garden into
what I took to be the marquee, suddenly realised it was actually his trousers
hanging on the washing line.
Os makes all the decisions in Tweebuffels…
Lifestyle
All houses (well, farms) have gates made of wagon wheels. These are not
decorative features. Wherever the axle snapped, the ox died, or the wheel broke
during the trek, that’s where the farm is. Though none of these options leaves the
trekker with much choice, the last eventuality is considered particularly unlucky: it
means you have a farm with a broken front gate, and all your friends will ride over
and point at it and laugh hearty farmer-type laughs.
This is a policy tested through generations of faith and luck (some of it bad). You
note that there are no farms in places with like Shit Creek or Salt Flats. Not any
more, anyway.
For more on the geopolitics of farmsteads (and other things), see my recently re-
printed undergraduate dissertation Roy Chubby Brown and the geopolitics of the
geopolis: or Frome Wasn’t Built in a Day.**
Pastimes & Entertainment
In honour of my arrival, Os took me out and put on a personal demonstration of Ox
Wrestling. (There is a reason the Springboks have won the rugby World Cup twice).
Later we ate an excellent meal of immaculately tenderised ox.
Food and Drink
Another Afrikaans source of seemingly limitless nutrition is wors, or sausage. This
comes in almost limitless variations, too: Boerewors (not made with real Boere),
Bugherwors (ditto: and not a burger, either), braaiwors (for the braai) and dikwors.
There are also various cheap kinds of wors, sold on petrol station forecourts and
known, collectively, as kudthisbienniewors.
My favourite, though, is Droewors (‘dried’). You can carry it around in your pocket for
days, and if someone tries to mug you – a reasonable concern for South Africans –
you have an improvised cosh handy. Achtung, however! Don’t eat it late at night:
like apples and popcorn it is a very tasty snack, but heaven help you if you get the
bits stuck between your molars.
Their bowel-distending diet notwithstanding, the Afrikaans can be pretty fussy
eaters. A word to the wise: if you are sent out to buy rooibos (‘redbush’) tea from
the shop – that’s THE shop – do not come back with the ‘healthy’ green tea variant.
Your hosts will not find this at all funny.
Which brings us to…
The famous Afrikaans humour
I am told, on good authority, that the Afrikaners have a rather splendid running
joke at the expense of the English. After two centuries of inter-racial banter I
figured this was a lot of ‘running’. It turns out the joke consists of calling every
Englishman (or Engelsman) a ‘rooinek’. Ha ha! Furchtbar! They are a subtle people,
the Afrikaans. (Their poetry is quite something to behold.)
Though I had intended to conduct more in-depth research in this area – not least to
fulfil the criteria of my funding – my attempts to investigate the phenomenon of
Afrikaans humour were cut short. From the first four farmers (natürlich) I
interviewed on the topic, I got nothing but a slow baring of the teeth and a glint in
the eye, the origins of neither of which I felt inclined to investigate more thoroughly.
Hospitality
Everyone in South Africa is a cousin of pretty much everyone else, if only because
everyone goes around referring to pretty much everyone else as ‘cuzzzennnn!’ So it
can get pretty difficult to work out whose cuzzzennnn is which and which
cuzzzennnn is whose and whose cuzzzennnn is which.
Being a terribly hospitable people, though, it ultimately doesn’t matter. You can
crash on almost any farmer’s floor after a lekke night ‘out’, and they will not only
ignore the fact that they never met you before, but doubtless also cook you a
monster breakfast and apologise for not having Sibusiso make up the guest room
at 2am.
There are downsides to thinking everyone is a relative, though. When some girl
starts showing emotional interest one rather assumes it’s because she’s a second
cousin twice removed, and really DOES just want to see where one keeps all one’s
research materials. As opposed to a farm-girl who has never met any men outside
of her immediate family, that is.
What I took to be some sort of family tradition of painting figures on one another’s
bodies quickly turned out to be young Lindell daubing her phone-number on my leg
in bull’s blood (and I don’t mean the vintage Bulgarian wine…). Luckily, phone
numbers in Tweebuffels are only three digits long, so I was able to obliterate the
incriminating evidence before anyone noticed.
That was the end of my stay in Tweebuffels… but I had just enough time to pay
visits to a couple of other places in the neighbourhood – a term, in South Africa,
generally meaning anywhere within 500kms.
The first of these was Nylstroom. In the 1860s a somewhat conservative
Voortrekker group, known as the Jerusalem Trekkers, struck out north, away from
the British, to find the Holy Land. I do not say I doubt their commitment, or that I
question their intelligence or navigational skills. All I say is that they stopped at the
first river they found which flowed north, reasoning it must be the Nile/Nyl.***
Accordingly, Nylstroom is a rather straight-laced conurbation. Former President JG
Strijdom used to live here. The Dutch Reformed Church here (or Nederduits
Gereformeerde Kerk) is the oldest church between Pretoria and the Sahara. And of
course the town is also unfortunately famous for having a British concentration
camp here, during the Boer War.
My editor, Mr ASH Smyth, tells me he once visited Nylstroom, and – during a sermon
by the Dominee – was personally held accountable blame for all British atrocities in
the Boer conflicts. Chief among these was the fact that, after razing the farms and
interning the women and children in an attempt to bring the truculent Kommandos
in from the fields, the ‘redcoats’ burned the church organ.
When recounting this anecdote he always notes (with a grim satisfaction that does
him little credit) that the church soon bought a replacement organ: from Rochester,
England.
I left Nylstroom after getting into a spot of bother involving my attempt to be
friendly to a girl I thought had appalling laryngitis, or perhaps a cleft pallet. But it
turned out she was trying to tell me she loved me.**** See Language.
The only other place I visited on this trip was Hotazel. All I need to inform you about
Hotazel is that the temperature routinely hits 40°C.
The highlight of my kultural week, then, was a Queen tribute show at the
Universiteit van Pretoria, called ‘I Want to Braaik Free’. I took notes and reflected
on the manifold pleasures of being Professor of Comparative Literatures, while a
roomful of heavy-set Afrikaaner men pretended they were having a good time and
tried very hard to look comfortable as a moustached deviant pranced around the
stage.
---
* Entertainment expenses not included. It was assumed that we would go Dutch.
** HKZPress, Lulu.com, 2007.
*** There is a place called Jerusalem in Slovenia, based on the same principle.
Having found a nice patch of Mediterranean vine-yard, the knights decided that
their pledge ‘to crusade until they reached Jerusalem’ could easily be made true
retrospectively. The pen being mightier than the sword, etc.
**** ‘Ek is lief vir jou.’ – you can see where the confusion arose.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie is Professor of Comparative Literatures at the Universiteit
van Ghwentse Fanie. His Kultur Kolum appears every Friday on The Lizard.
Back to the homepage
mit PROFESSOR HANS KNEESENBOOM-ZEDEYSIE
Friday, February 15, 2008
I must beguine by making apologies for my absence last week. I have been visiting
my relatives in South Africa and, as you might infer from what follows, electronic
communications were somewhere betweën few und far.
English visitors to South Africa are forever confounded by persistent references to
half the white population as being ‘Dutch’. This is ironic, since here in Holland we in
fact have a poor track record when it comes to recognising our shared cultural
heritage with our Afrikaans cousins.
This has long been a source of intellectual and ethical discomfort for me, so I
begged 10 days’ leave from my teaching duties and persuaded the European
Commission’s education committee to provide some funding for me to launch the
inaugural Dutch-‘Dutch’ Friendship Conference.*
This decision had nothing whatever to do with the fact that February is a superb
time of year to visit South Africa (the ‘Beau Kaap’ is especially beau this time of year,
if you’re down south), nor the fact that the airline of my choice just happened to
route through Accra, where my old college friend and footsie team-mate, Otto
Pfister, was steering the Ghanaian team to a perfectly respectable third place in the
Africa(n) Cup of Nations.
It was, of course, a terrible pity that none of my UvGF colleagues received their
Conference invitations in time to attend. Aber, someone had to stay behind and
cover my classes. The third years on the Intermediary Mediations and Middling
Mittle-Europeans Medians course have an exam in three weeks.
And so it was that, last Monday, I found myself alone, in the thriving South African
metropolis of Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein.
Now, anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of Dutch/Afrikaans will
know that this means ‘the place where the two buffaloes were killed stone dead
with one shot: that place there, where the spring is’. The difficulty arises, if at all,
only in the pronunciation (and because, even within South Africa, many people
belief the town to be fictional).
To the locals, however, for ease and because life is zu kurtz, it is known simply as
‘Tweebuffels…’ So, here are my findings from my stay in Tweebuffels…
Language
Afrikaners speak in a manner surprisingly reminiscent of the Russian Ambassador in
The Hunt for Red October. Linguistic experts have put forward various theories to
explain this, none of which have dealt sufficiently with the underlying irony that the
Afrikaans have always had a visceral hatred of all things Soviet.
The Afrikaans language includes the word arslikhan. It is, as you say, exactly what it
says on the can. It is also very useful when reviewing excessively-flattering
biographies of African politicians.
I also kept hearing a word that sounded startlingly like ‘kaffir’. For an entire week I
was terrified about confessing that, back home, I am actually on first name terms
with several black people, none of whom are my employees (though many of them
are employed, especially in the Jamaican Naughty Cookie House round the corner
from the Universiteit). In the end, though, ‘kaffir’ turned out to be ‘kiff, eh?’, a
phrase meaning something similar to the German ‘über-cool’ or the French ‘hyper-
chouette!’ Very odd.
Nomenclature
Afrikaners not named after towns (men called Pieter are named for Pietersburg, eg)
are generally named after flowers, rock-formations or biblical characters. The latter
two varieties tend to have beards to match, regardless of gender.
Mercifully, no-one has been named after Tweebuffels(…). Yet.
Politics
Tweebuffels has a system of government controlled by an honorary tribal chief. The
current incumbent is a farmer (natürlich) by the name of Os du Randt. During my
preliminary researches for this junket I made enquiries regarding Chief Os, and was
told that he was very friendly but that I ought not to look him in the eye for too long
because he was ‘twice the man you are’.
I have subsequently discovered this to be literally true. I went to a braai
(barbecue/abattoir auction) at his house and, stumbling through the garden into
what I took to be the marquee, suddenly realised it was actually his trousers
hanging on the washing line.
Os makes all the decisions in Tweebuffels…
Lifestyle
All houses (well, farms) have gates made of wagon wheels. These are not
decorative features. Wherever the axle snapped, the ox died, or the wheel broke
during the trek, that’s where the farm is. Though none of these options leaves the
trekker with much choice, the last eventuality is considered particularly unlucky: it
means you have a farm with a broken front gate, and all your friends will ride over
and point at it and laugh hearty farmer-type laughs.
This is a policy tested through generations of faith and luck (some of it bad). You
note that there are no farms in places with like Shit Creek or Salt Flats. Not any
more, anyway.
For more on the geopolitics of farmsteads (and other things), see my recently re-
printed undergraduate dissertation Roy Chubby Brown and the geopolitics of the
geopolis: or Frome Wasn’t Built in a Day.**
Pastimes & Entertainment
In honour of my arrival, Os took me out and put on a personal demonstration of Ox
Wrestling. (There is a reason the Springboks have won the rugby World Cup twice).
Later we ate an excellent meal of immaculately tenderised ox.
Food and Drink
Another Afrikaans source of seemingly limitless nutrition is wors, or sausage. This
comes in almost limitless variations, too: Boerewors (not made with real Boere),
Bugherwors (ditto: and not a burger, either), braaiwors (for the braai) and dikwors.
There are also various cheap kinds of wors, sold on petrol station forecourts and
known, collectively, as kudthisbienniewors.
My favourite, though, is Droewors (‘dried’). You can carry it around in your pocket for
days, and if someone tries to mug you – a reasonable concern for South Africans –
you have an improvised cosh handy. Achtung, however! Don’t eat it late at night:
like apples and popcorn it is a very tasty snack, but heaven help you if you get the
bits stuck between your molars.
Their bowel-distending diet notwithstanding, the Afrikaans can be pretty fussy
eaters. A word to the wise: if you are sent out to buy rooibos (‘redbush’) tea from
the shop – that’s THE shop – do not come back with the ‘healthy’ green tea variant.
Your hosts will not find this at all funny.
Which brings us to…
The famous Afrikaans humour
I am told, on good authority, that the Afrikaners have a rather splendid running
joke at the expense of the English. After two centuries of inter-racial banter I
figured this was a lot of ‘running’. It turns out the joke consists of calling every
Englishman (or Engelsman) a ‘rooinek’. Ha ha! Furchtbar! They are a subtle people,
the Afrikaans. (Their poetry is quite something to behold.)
Though I had intended to conduct more in-depth research in this area – not least to
fulfil the criteria of my funding – my attempts to investigate the phenomenon of
Afrikaans humour were cut short. From the first four farmers (natürlich) I
interviewed on the topic, I got nothing but a slow baring of the teeth and a glint in
the eye, the origins of neither of which I felt inclined to investigate more thoroughly.
Hospitality
Everyone in South Africa is a cousin of pretty much everyone else, if only because
everyone goes around referring to pretty much everyone else as ‘cuzzzennnn!’ So it
can get pretty difficult to work out whose cuzzzennnn is which and which
cuzzzennnn is whose and whose cuzzzennnn is which.
Being a terribly hospitable people, though, it ultimately doesn’t matter. You can
crash on almost any farmer’s floor after a lekke night ‘out’, and they will not only
ignore the fact that they never met you before, but doubtless also cook you a
monster breakfast and apologise for not having Sibusiso make up the guest room
at 2am.
There are downsides to thinking everyone is a relative, though. When some girl
starts showing emotional interest one rather assumes it’s because she’s a second
cousin twice removed, and really DOES just want to see where one keeps all one’s
research materials. As opposed to a farm-girl who has never met any men outside
of her immediate family, that is.
What I took to be some sort of family tradition of painting figures on one another’s
bodies quickly turned out to be young Lindell daubing her phone-number on my leg
in bull’s blood (and I don’t mean the vintage Bulgarian wine…). Luckily, phone
numbers in Tweebuffels are only three digits long, so I was able to obliterate the
incriminating evidence before anyone noticed.
That was the end of my stay in Tweebuffels… but I had just enough time to pay
visits to a couple of other places in the neighbourhood – a term, in South Africa,
generally meaning anywhere within 500kms.
The first of these was Nylstroom. In the 1860s a somewhat conservative
Voortrekker group, known as the Jerusalem Trekkers, struck out north, away from
the British, to find the Holy Land. I do not say I doubt their commitment, or that I
question their intelligence or navigational skills. All I say is that they stopped at the
first river they found which flowed north, reasoning it must be the Nile/Nyl.***
Accordingly, Nylstroom is a rather straight-laced conurbation. Former President JG
Strijdom used to live here. The Dutch Reformed Church here (or Nederduits
Gereformeerde Kerk) is the oldest church between Pretoria and the Sahara. And of
course the town is also unfortunately famous for having a British concentration
camp here, during the Boer War.
My editor, Mr ASH Smyth, tells me he once visited Nylstroom, and – during a sermon
by the Dominee – was personally held accountable blame for all British atrocities in
the Boer conflicts. Chief among these was the fact that, after razing the farms and
interning the women and children in an attempt to bring the truculent Kommandos
in from the fields, the ‘redcoats’ burned the church organ.
When recounting this anecdote he always notes (with a grim satisfaction that does
him little credit) that the church soon bought a replacement organ: from Rochester,
England.
I left Nylstroom after getting into a spot of bother involving my attempt to be
friendly to a girl I thought had appalling laryngitis, or perhaps a cleft pallet. But it
turned out she was trying to tell me she loved me.**** See Language.
The only other place I visited on this trip was Hotazel. All I need to inform you about
Hotazel is that the temperature routinely hits 40°C.
The highlight of my kultural week, then, was a Queen tribute show at the
Universiteit van Pretoria, called ‘I Want to Braaik Free’. I took notes and reflected
on the manifold pleasures of being Professor of Comparative Literatures, while a
roomful of heavy-set Afrikaaner men pretended they were having a good time and
tried very hard to look comfortable as a moustached deviant pranced around the
stage.
---
* Entertainment expenses not included. It was assumed that we would go Dutch.
** HKZPress, Lulu.com, 2007.
*** There is a place called Jerusalem in Slovenia, based on the same principle.
Having found a nice patch of Mediterranean vine-yard, the knights decided that
their pledge ‘to crusade until they reached Jerusalem’ could easily be made true
retrospectively. The pen being mightier than the sword, etc.
**** ‘Ek is lief vir jou.’ – you can see where the confusion arose.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Hans Kneesenboom-Zedeysie is Professor of Comparative Literatures at the Universiteit
van Ghwentse Fanie. His Kultur Kolum appears every Friday on The Lizard.
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