Review: Vivien Horler
The End of Normal – Witness to the unravelling of white power in South Africa, by Max du Preez (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
In 1976, just after the eruption of the Soweto uprising and the killing of scores of pupils by the police on June 16, the eminent academic Franklin Sonn said: “Today it is over for apartheid and the National Party… It’s just a matter of time.”
Fourteen turbulent years later, President FW de Klerk stood up in Parliament, unbanned the liberation movements and announced the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. It was all over bar the shouting (although there was quite a lot of shouting).
Pondering those 14 years, Max du Preez, journalist, editor, Afrikaner iconoclast and a man with a great sense of humour, writes in this sort-of-memoir: “How did it come about that the National Party government, a self-declared champion of Western civilisation and Christianity, descended into the murky depths of death squads, assassination, poisoning and kidnapping? This is how I understand it. After the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the white government realised that apartheid as an ideology had failed utterly. They understood that it was ‘the end of normal’.”
And their reaction was commensurate. Du Preez writes: “On the military front, activists of the ANC, UDF, PAC, Cosatu and others had to be mercilessly dealt with – locked up, tortured, killed, discredited. They don’t play according to the rules, so why should we? They break the laws; why can’t we? Out-terrorise the terrorists.”
And, as the TRC revealed in sickening detail, they did.
Max du Preez and I are almost exactly the same age – he was born in 1951, I in early 1952, and we both grew up in South Africa. But he was raised in Kroonstad, a white Afrikaner, son of Boer War fighters and descendent of trekboers His ancestors came to South Africa more than 300 years ago.
I however was born in England, and came to South Africa at the age of one, daughter of British parents who referred to England as “home” with a small “h” – because it was home. (Although my great-grandfather arrived in South Africa as far back as 1890 as an Uitlander gold miner.)
As young reporters in Cape Town in 1973/74 we both covered the Cape Town Magistrates’ Courts, which is how I know about his sense of humour.
He grew up in a world far more circumscribed than mine, writing that he discovered the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Who only after he left school.
But he has come a helluva long way, brave, principled, innovative, the founding editor of the courageous but ultimately doomed – thanks to the machinations of the apartheid regime – Vrye Weekblad.
In 1976 when Du Preez was working for an Afrikaans newspaper in Johannesburg, he was sent to Soweto on June 16 to cover an erupting news story. He says his account – and all that came later – is an attempt to give readers an insight into “who and what I was as a white South African as a product of my society when I arrived in Soweto early that morning of June 16, how I experienced the event and how I understood its impact and aftermath”.
So this is a journey through the years between 1976 and where we find ourselves today. Much of it you will know of, will have lived through, and will remember clearly. But it’s also a deeply personal and insightful take on what happened over the past 50 years, for many of us a major chunk of our lives.
He asks pertinent questions such as: “How did my tribe go from fighting British colonialism … to behaving as cruel oppressors themselves?” As he points out, Gaza comes to mind.
And how did white Afrikaners fight so hard against the imposition of the English language vis-a-vis Dutch/Afrikaans in the early part of the 20th century, only to force Afrikaans on the black pupils of Soweto, a major trigger of the 1976 uprising.
And then he moves on to the present and the future, to what appears to be a chilling resurgence “of Afrikaner nationalism and tribal chauvinism”, and the impact of the US’s Donald Trump, asking: “Could all this be in essence a desire to return to the old ‘normal’, before 1976?”
He says the book is not meant to be a definitive explanation of the psyche of Akrikaners and white South Africans. “It is merely my personal, subjective effort to give some insights into that soul.”
If you were there, you will remember, and appreciate his openness; if you weren’t, you’ll get some understanding and discover what the past 50 years in South Africa were like, at least from one important perspective. This is a book well worth reading for any student of our current South African society.