The Spectator - October 29, 2016

A race apart

Stephen Robinson

Bridge Over Blood River:

The Afrikaners’ Fight for Survival

by Kajsa Norman

Hurst, £17.99, pp. 280

South African democracy has not, on the

whole, been kind to the Afrikaner. During

Nelson Mandela’s benign oversight of the

Rainbow Nation, liberal Afrikaners per-

suaded themselves that all would turn out

well in the end. But in their hearts, they

sensed it would go wrong. And so it has.

At the time of writing, President Zuma is

aggressively defenestrating his finance min-

ister, one of the few competent figures in his

tawdry administration, and the rand is sink-

ing so fast as to make post-Brexit sterling

seem positively muscular.

Kajsa Norman notes that, since the

first democratic election in 1994, at least

117,000 whites have been purged from the

civil service, traditionally home to poorly

educated Afrikaners. Thousands more have

been driven off their farms due to ‘land

redistribution’ measures, and hundreds

of farmers and their families have been

murdered. Things are so bad for the rural

Afrikaner that some of them are trek-

king off to central and west Africa, where

their agricultural skills are actively sought.

Norman, a London-based Swedish writ-

er with a taste for exploring hell-holes,

takes on the future of the embattled Afri-

kaner with remarkable tenacity and intelli-

gence. Her fellow Swede, the late Henning

Mankell — who would spend half his year

in Mozambique, escaping the tedium of

Scandinavia and the unwanted celebrity of

his Wallander novels — acts as her muse

and editor, and also provides an idiosyn-

cratic foreword from the grave.

I was based as a foreign correspondent

in South Africa in the 1980s, so I know how

easy it is to patronise and ridicule Afrikan-

ers. I began with low expectations for this

book, especially when Norman sets up her

story with a distillation of the most obvious

secondary historical sources. But when she

travels to the interior and gets dust on her

boots, the book suddenly takes off, because

she is an original and daring reporter.

She visits Orania, a racially exclusive

settlement in the depopulated fringes of

the Karoo desert, set up in the 1990s by

Afrikaners who wanted no part of the new

South Africa. The really radical thing is that

it does not allow even black servants; so

whites do all the menial work there, which

must be the only place on the entire conti-

nent where this happens.

Every foreign correspondent still based

in South Africa goes to Orania to poke fun

at Afrikaner obduracy. But Norman trav-

els there and hangs around, forming bonds

not with the dreary civic leaders but with

the low-life characters living in the single

men’s block. There she befriends a range

of scary yet strangely endearing charac-

ters, damaged, toothless veterans of past

wars ‘on the border’, and other drink-and-

drug-addled Afrikaners who have been

unable to cope since life for the white man

suddenly became much more difficult.

This is by no means an easy journalistic

endeavour, least of all for a blonde Scandi-

navian woman. But she presses on relent-

lessly into the country’s interior, pitching

her tent by the site of the Battle of Blood

River to observe Afrikaner celebrations

of the day in 1838 when the Voortrekkers

slaughtered thousands of Zulus to avenge

Piet Retief’s murder by the perfidious

King Dingane.

Her book takes its title from a failed

effort to reconcile the Afrikaner and the

Zulu by building a bridge over Blood

River to connect the Boers’ hallowed land

with the black settlement on the other

side. Despite the lavishing of millions of

rands in this gesture of reconciliation, the

two parties cannot agree on management

of the bridge, so it remains closed.

Norman heads off to Mozambique

and meets a genial young Afrikaner, Wil-

lem, who has moved to Maputo to expe-

rience the ‘real’ Africa. But as she soon

discovers, the city has become just anoth-

er place where ‘the internationals advo-

cating for the rights of the disadvantaged

often live as segregated from them as pos-

sible’. In other words, Willem and the ide-

alistic young European, Canadian and

Australian aid workers are as impecca-

bly racially exclusive as the Afrikaners of

Orania.

Norman finally turns her thesis on its

head. She recounts a discussion with Her-

mann Giliomee, a liberal Afrikaner aca-

demic, in which she asks him how long his

people will survive. He responds by asking

her whether the Swedes will survive in the

long run, and she admits she is thrown by

his question, but takes his point.

So by the end of this surprising book,

Norman has set up the precariousness

of the Afrikaner as a model for all the

nations in the world which counter their

low birth rates and ageing populations

with mass immigration. The question is no

longer can the Afrikaner survive, but can

we?

Assured and scrupulously report-

ed, this is perhaps the most interesting

book about South Africa to have appeared

since Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart 26

years ago.

Fallen idol: Mercia dela Querra, the caretaker of Orania’s Verwoerd

museum, sits beside the bronze head of the founder of apartheid

GETTY IMAGES

BOOKS & ARTS

Orania must be the only place on

the African continent where whites

do all the menial work