Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

When Goldblatt’s “Some Afrikaners Photographed” was first published, it was met with anger, with outrage and ultimately with a sales boycott. According to the back cover, “most of the small printrun had to be sold off for a song”.

The version I am reading is called “Some Afrikaners Revisited“, and was published in 2007.

Many of the photographs in this book was taken close to my year of birth – 1967. Many of the people in the pictures are the age of my grandparents and parents. Much of the unwitting and implied language is that with which I grew up.

Policement, farmers, pretty young women who smiled despite the sun and heat, desperate and hopeful labourers, ignorant young braves, stoics, fascists, evil old men. The look on the face of the bride on page 142.

I found this book hugely evocative – probably because I grew up in this culture. But I suspect that it may be useful for other South Africans to look at this – these pictures were taken twenty years after the Republic of South Africa was established, after independence from Great Britain. It is now, almost, twenty years after the end of apartheid.

“A plague of black locusts infesting the country, muching without cease, devouring lives. Why in a spirit of horror and loathing, do I watch them ?”

The latter text is quoted by Antjie Krog in the preamble to the book, and is from JM Coetzee’s Age of Iron. It tells of what the Afrikaners knew the British to think of them. History repeats itself, viciously.

To quite Krog – this book is not-us. Yet, it is all of us. And even if the history and present of South Africa is of no concern to you, the photographs are works of art in any context.

This book is worth owning.