The art of saam-mekaar-andersmaak: Breyten Breytenbach in response to Lis Lange's letter

Dear Professor Lange

Thank you for taking up the cudgels for Professor Jansen. (I believe your letter was translated – with a slip or two. For instance, one would “vel ’n oordeel”, not “fel”, even though the verdict may be fierce at times. Would it not be easier if we were to trade the skin of our interaction in English?)

Before touching on the cause of your concern, I would like to query your description of my thinking as “eng” (it must have been something like “narrow-minded” or “restricted” in the original). Bit of a shortcut? I would have thought that, with age, it is clear that I lean over backward – perhaps to make up for the stoop brought about by looking for the way – in an attempt to accommodate the complexity of positions and convictions encountered here. The words that come to mind, I admit, are rather “blustering” and “blathering”, sorry to say. But surely, it is not because we may disagree in our assessments of what we see around us that my thinking has shrunk? Still, who knows? Perhaps the eng road is the obligatory passage to becoming amply Engels?

It may be slightly displeasing to know that my passing reference to Professor Jansen’s book Knowledge in the Blood. Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past was not in any sense the subject or the focus of my submission to the Convocation of Stellenbosch University. The theme I tried to speak to was the nature of the space, ideally one of dialogue, in which conversations about languages at tertiary institutions of education take place.

The passage in question suggested that the regrettable Nazi-like uttering of the vice-chancellor of your university (as inferred in the title of his book) carries the assertion that racism is in the blood of the whitish Afrikaner. I asked, rhetorically, whether this could be the case. For are we then not alluding to an “impure race”? Why not deduce that the cockroaches ought to have yellow stars pinned to their safari jackets to facilitate identification? And I concluded my little aside by saying that to be racist in any form or expression does not mean that one is exercising one’s freedom of speech: racism is not an opinion but a crime.

You’ll agree with me, Ms Lange, that the references resonate with unbearable historical events where segments of mankind driven by mad ideologies always positing the elimination of the Other showed the worst we as a species are capable of. To stigmatise people, to essentialise them as group, is to initiate a perception that would delegitimise their existence. To ascribe to them generalised characteristics and attitudes – even if you wrap your approach in an academic cloak by suggesting that this “troubled knowledge” afflicting white Afrikaner youth, the ostensible subject of the professor’s study, is transmitted through “the family, the church, cultural associations and the peer group” – must, as logical conclusion and inevitable inference, become the populist discourse of exclusion that we risk again in this country. (In Rwanda the Tutsis were called cockroaches by those in power in order to prepare the conditions for an ethnic cleansing. And we should react with indignation to what is being done to the Kurdish people in Turkey and to the Palestinian people occupied in the Bantustans imposed by Israel. Because we know. We’ve been there.)

I am not saying this is what Professor Jansen propounds. But the axiomatic assumption suggested by “knowledge in the blood” (and note that there was no question mark) reeks to me of the implication that there is a category of the “born guilty” that needs to be studied and understood and converted because they carry in the blood, genetically therefore, the taint of racism. It is, of course, the same blood that Professor Jansen and I have coursing in our veins and that we share with mankind – if you’ll allow this whitish pot to call a similarly whitish kettle black …

Given the level of wilful intolerance in this country – now presented as “pragmatism” and “making up for past injustices” – against the backdrop of a cadredom of robbers who have stolen power in the name of a people’s struggle for justice and dignity, and this in an environment where there’s neither political probity nor ethical guidance, I think the title of Professor Jansen’s book, and the discourse of exclusion purveyed by it, is an opportunistic but poisonous brown herring drawn over inflammable ground. It should be reasonable to expect of a person with academic and pedagogical responsibilities and renown not to inflame a situation already fraught with the generalised ressentiment of a generation left in the lurch by rapacious “leaders”.

Let us be clear – even if expressed in Globish: I abhor apartheid and the evil wreaked by it – the killing, the torture, the mass removal of people, the humiliation and the indignity, but also the relativist morality and the stunted imagination and the racism it engendered. Yes, we are still living with the consequences. But equally fiercely I’ll oppose and fight with all the cultural means at my disposal (including language) this reactionary majoritarianism which is the continuation of the spirit and even the realities of apartheid by other means – this politically correct smarminess that comes with the notion that salvation, nation-building, progress, anti-colonialism, the regaining of agency, progress … are posited on the elimination of the Other. We just cannot deny the hybrid nature of our history and present reality. We will have to practise the complicated and never-ending dialectic between the specificities of diversity and the encompassing values that make a true mending of our wounds possible. We are obliged to bring to life the political, economic, social and cultural art of saam-mekaar-andersmaak.

Of more immediate concern are the decisions apparently about to be made – or already made – about language policy at your university. It would seem that the “extra mile” of diversity and thus allowing students to develop to the fulness of their possibilities is about to be sacrificed as an ersatz solution to much more serious systemic inequality.

This “pea-under-the-cup” situation, I submit in all sincerity, is what the vice-chancellor ought to be applying the broadness of his mind and the amplitude of his proven empathy to. But the dice are rolled, are they not? The good professor, in his essentialist view of “the Afrikaner”, seems to be of the opinion that people who support the retention of Afrikaans as a language of tertiary education will not be motivated by the constitutional principle of language rights but, in reality, by the defence of “race” and “culture”, “racialised claims of supremacy”, “ethnicised claims for protection” and “keeping blacks out of white schools”. Other than being gobsmacked by the derivations of this knowledge in the blood, I’d like to suggest to the professor that this must be a textbook case of serving unadulterated male bovine manure on the platter of political expediency.

Today I heard the news that Algeria – another example of how a “national liberation movement” fired by once noble idealism and a quest for justice attempted to centralise a diverse country by doing away with doubt and opposition and questioning, only to plunge their people into a bloody civil war – has decreed that Berber will henceforth have the same rights and recognition as Arabic. One presumes that this includes the right for Berber to be taught and used as a means of communication, even in the universities!

Now why would South Africa decide to go the opposite, reactionary, outdated, self-negating way of trying to impose the hegemony of the imperial tongue? As if that would somehow hide the real problems that we avoid facing at our peril!

Sincerely

Breyten Breytenbach

US-konvokasie 2016

Die Viserektor van die UV se reaksie op Breytenbach se US Konvokasietoespraak

Lis Lange

"Knowledge in the blood is 'n navorsingsgebaseerde studie om te probeer verstaan waarom 'n geslag van jong wit Suid-Afrikaners wat nog nooit apartheid of die mees traumatiese aspekte van die Afrikanergeskiedenis beleef het nie, so gegrond is in 'n diskoers van identiteit, vrees, wanhoop en bitterheid."

US-konvokasietoespraak: Die koei in die bos
Breyten Breytenbach

"Indien Afrikaans as omgangstaal, administratiewe taal, onderrigtaal hier sou verketter word en krimp, gaan dit uiteindelik tot ’n onvermydelike tot niet maak van ’n kosbare en geskakeerde instrument van bewuswording lei."

US-konvokasie 2016: Courage, Compassion and Complexity - Reflections on the new Matieland and South Africa
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"Ladies and gentlemen, something is brewing in South Africa. I do not know the name of that something, but I know that it is irreversible and will continue to brew and boil over, whether we give it permission to do so or not."

US-konvokasie 2016: Afskeidstoespraak deur Christo Viljoen, uittredende president
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"Stellenbosch dien Suid-Afrika al vir 150 jaar. Hy wil voortgaan om dit deur sy gehalte en deur ’n inklusiewe kultuur en taalgebruik te doen. Daarvoor het hy selfstandigheid en ruimte en ons almal se samewerking nodig. Dan kan Stellenbosch wéér sê hy staan vir ’n idee."

US-konvokasie 2016: Universiteit Stellenbosch: Vorentoe!
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"Deur Engels as onderrigtaal te gebruik, sorg ons dat ons toeganklik is vir meer mense. Maar daar is steeds ’n groot behoefte aan en vraag na Afrikaans, daarom duur ons aanbod daarin voort." Rektor en visekanselier Wim de Villiers se mededelings aan die US-konvokasie.