Antjie Krog: The role of the poet in a divided South Africa

When South African writer Antjie Krog was just 17, she wrote a poem for her school magazine which was shocking enough to upset Kroonstad High’s parents.

The furore caught the attention of the Sunday newspapers, who descended on the town in the Free State province.

ALSO READ: Can Themba: The late rebel journalist was a teacher at heart

ANTJIE KROG’S EARLIEST WORK

The 17-year-old had expressed the desire to:

build myself a land/where skin colour doesn’t count/only the inner brand/of self; where no goat face in parliament/can keep things permanently verkrampt/where I can love you,/can lie beside you in the grass/without saying ‘I do’/where black and white hand in hand/can bring peace and love/to my beautiful land.“ (Translated from Afrikaans by Krog.)

Antjie Krog

In South Africa in 1970, the minority white government’s apartheid policy spurned “racial” mixing and prohibited sexual relations between black and white.

The poem attacked Afrikaner conservatives (verkrampt means cramped, but also a political designation).

Die Beeld newspaper repeated the entire poem and consulted Dr Ernst van der Heerden, poet and head of Afrikaans and Nederlands at Wits University, about whether it had value.

His opinion was that Krog’s work was like that of famed poets Breyten Breytenbach and DJ Opperman.

More press descended, the poem was published again (in English in the Rand Daily Mail).

Her mother got involved in defending her writing. The poem appeared in the African National Congress (ANC) publication Sechaba (the ANC, now the country’s governing party, was then a liberation movement in exile).

Her father was summonsed by the Broederbond (a powerful and secretive patriarchal Afrikaans nationalist society), to explain how this could have happened.

Anthea Garman, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.