Picture credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/ox-wagon-relief-wagon-depiction-438110/
Back in May, I made plans to see Die gelofte: ’n Musiekblyspel at the AfriForum Teater. This was before mask rules and the national restrictions on venue capacity were lifted, and because I found myself staying in Pretoria East, I was extremely curious. In a country where actors aren’t unionised and cultural venues suffer an unrelentingly perilous existence, I took notice when I learned that Afriforum – lodestar of the Afrikaans right wing – had invested in a full-scale theatre complex in the nation’s capital. What kind of a venue was this? And what kind of musical would Die gelofte be? While taking care to avoid actually joining Afriforum (navigating their website can be tricky), I bought a ticket and prepared myself for a Tuesday night full to the brim with kultuur. What I witnessed was appalling to me as a historian, but I think it says something about where South Africa finds itself in 2022.
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While taking care to avoid actually joining Afriforum (navigating their website can be tricky), I bought a ticket and prepared myself for a Tuesday night full to the brim with kultuur. What I witnessed was appalling to me as a historian, but I think it says something about where South Africa finds itself in 2022.
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You don’t need to take my word for it: as of this moment, Die gelofte is still playing at “the AfriForum”. By South African standards, it’s been a smash hit. Its initial run of 6 to 29 May was so successful that it was extended by three weeks. According to the theatre’s Instagram page, the extended dates sold out almost a week before the show was scheduled to close, and so a second run was added for September, ending for good (so they say) the day after Heritage Day. No black box affair either – the AfriForum auditorium seats 380 and includes an attached restaurant, Pronk. I genuinely thought that by the end of the extended run in June, the market for Afrikaner nationalist musicals in Pretoria would have reached a saturation point, but clearly I was mistaken.
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I saw Die gelofte on a Tuesday because it was literally the only option; all the other dates were sold out, and I managed to snag one of the last available seats.
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I saw Die gelofte on a Tuesday because it was literally the only option; all the other dates were sold out, and I managed to snag one of the last available seats. I found this especially noteworthy, because with tickets ranging from R280 for gallery to R350 for orchestra, Die gelofte is more than twice as pricey as the Market Theatre’s current production of The parrot woman, which is also a historical piece. The crowd skewed young – many families but also couples, with at least one uniformed hoërskool cohort in attendance. As far as I could tell, there was one person of colour in the audience that night.
The story Die gelofte tells will be familiar to many, especially those who can recall the days when it was the government’s official line. The year is 1838. In response to Zulu treachery, the Voortrekkers appeal to God for deliverance out of their enemy’s hands, sealing a vow (gelofte in Afrikaans) that marks them forever as God’s chosen people. In the show, the tale is recounted by a couple of teenagers who improbably find themselves locked in a room with a bunch of old Voortrekker love letters, and become immersed.
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During the show, we were told in no uncertain terms that any alternative retelling of this history is propaganda. And when the time came to make the actual vow, the house lights came on, the Voortrekker ensemble dispersed among the audience and we were all expected to stand and repeat its words.
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During the show, we were told in no uncertain terms that any alternative retelling of this history is propaganda. And when the time came to make the actual vow, the house lights came on, the Voortrekker ensemble dispersed among the audience and we were all expected to stand and repeat its words. There was a pearl-clutching part of me that couldn’t believe what I was seeing, in the year of our Lord 2022, 32 years after Nelson Mandela’s release and almost 200 after the events in question. This show – done up in a brand-new theatre, starring one of Afrikaans music’s biggest young stars – is an embarrassing throwback to the 1940s, to days of historical fabulism that should be long behind us.
And yet, on reflection, Die gelofte isn’t quite the throwback I first felt it was. Its innovations have mostly to do with its vapidity.
Since at least 1904, white playwrights have been dramatising the events of the vow and Blood River, and these events feature in some of South Africa’s most important early films, De Voortrekkers (1916) and Bou van ’n nasie (1938).
The difference between those productions and Die gelofte starts with the latter’s studied commitment to avoiding any kind of overt racial discourse. Die gelofte is reticent about race to an extent that I’m sure would shock CJ Langenhoven or Gustav Preller, let alone AfriForum’s present-day foes, the woke rabble and ANC/EFF types.
In Die gelofte, we get a battle scene of sorts, with lots of running and flashing lights, and we get a graphic description of some Zulu atrocities, but no actual Zulus anywhere. Additionally, one gets the impression from the play that the Great Trek was an all-white affair. In reality, more than half of the people who left the Cape Colony in the Trek period were enslaved – de facto enslaved – or free people of colour. Their presence among the Boers is acknowledged – albeit problematically – in the plays of Langenhoven and the stories of Preller. Even though they were usually rendered into offensive and marginalising caricatures, it would have been impossible for white authors in the early- to mid-twentieth century to ignore them entirely. In Die gelofte, however, writer Jannes Erasmus is apparently able to get away with doing just that.
Egregiously white, yet hell-bent on avoiding race talk: given AfriForum’s brief, it’s hard to imagine a musical like Die gelofte looking any different. Still, it’s remarkable that Die gelofte asks such a shallow set of questions of its own mythology. If one accepts at face value the classic narrative of the Great Trek – something that I don’t recommend, by the way – the key dilemmas of Afrikaner nationalism naturally present themselves. What does it actually mean to be a “chosen nation”? Whither the future relationship between Afrikaners and Africans? What does it mean to remember this history in the wake of Afrikanerdom’s defeat, whether at the hands of the British or the black majority? These are questions that motivated right-wing Afrikaner intellectuals for generations, and on them Die gelofte has absolutely nothing to say.
Thus while Die gelofte is not the innocuous romance it claims to be, as a reactionary manifesto it also fails. The script is too reluctant to stare into the void of its ideological roots. It retains only the aesthetics of old-time nationalism and a vague but passionately asserted sense of victimhood.
I’ve wondered a lot, in the wake of that Tuesday night, how the audience was meant to engage with Die gelofte. Taking it all at face value, it seems to me, would be an insult to everyone’s intelligence. The classic narrative of the vow just doesn’t make any sense as a story without the racist ideology at its heart. Erasmus is able to create a skein of coherence, but only if the audience refrains from asking questions. Why did God choose the Afrikaners – and to do what?
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Why did God choose the Afrikaners – and to do what?
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Is the audience expected to supply the racial subtext, because AfriForum fears saying the quiet part out loud? So much for standing up to the woke mob. What is the message here?
At one point, shocked at the gory aftermath of the Battle of Blood River, one of the male ensemble characters expresses a brief, forlorn hope that one day – someday far off in the future – Boer and Zulu will be able to coexist. This is the closest the play ever comes to affirming a diverse South Africa, and it’s not much. What an impossible bridge to cross!
Luckily, in this case at least, people are not very good at practising what they preach. As I write this, the first pinned post on Bernice West’s TikTok shows her dancing to the song “Lyfie”, off her album Jona. It has 5 629 likes and almost 60 000 views. “Lyfie” is a cheerful song about being created in the image of God – and it has an unmistakable amapiano beat. No Afrikaner separatism there. It really leads me to question how seriously the audience at Die gelofte was really taking it on that Tuesday night. Is the vow still the menacing political myth historians like Leonard Thompson had to spend vast quantities of ink debunking? Or is it now just a fairytale, shorn of stakes and consequences?
Ultimately, I think South Africans (most South Africans, anyway) are more pragmatic than they think they are, and maybe more pragmatic than they wish they were. And I wonder whether it’s possible to imagine that as a divine mission instead – ’n boer maak ’n plan?
Also read:
Wie het die ontwerp van die Voortrekkermonument geïnspireer: Farao of Abram?
Die veranderende betekenis van die Voortrekkermonument: erfeniswins of erfenisverlies?
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