Biblical Mythology in Andr� Brink's Anti-Apartheid Crusade

Abstract

cated how the writing of Ralph Standish (1612), which represents the black as a subhuman and mythical other, is representative of a long tradition of colonial writing, spanning the works of John Jordain (1608), Hondius (1652), Kolb (1719), Mentzel (1785), Barrow (1801), and Philip (1828), all aimed at the justification of European colonization. In a recent inquiry into the white's reflexive of the black migrant worker, Michael Wade reveals its culmination in a distressing arrest in the development of White perception (21) and explains this as the result of the impossibility of the white South African to see the black objectively. Wade's historical focus is mainly the years spanning the industrialization of South Africa, after the discovery of diamonds in the northwestern Cape in 1860. But his findings are typical: the roots ofthe whites' of the black are fully in economics. In the documents of the white imagination, the novel, poetry, drama, the newspaper, and other forms in which whites engage themselves effectively in a dialogue (speaking only less effectively to others), Wade notes: The giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the Whites' deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matte black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an under? standing of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago. (1) This essay proposes to consider Andre Brink's frequent depiction of characteristic Afrikaner reduction of the Bible to a white mythology that complements the materiality of apartheid. Read in the self-regarding gaze of Afrikaner consciousness severely hampered and narrowed by its morbid obsession with its tribulations and even threats of extinction in a heathen land, the Bible is distorted to a justification ofa racist ideology. Like historiography and cartography, theology too has become a species of mythmaking, annexed into the formidable machinery specifically created to empower the Afrikaner Establishment through the presentation of an authorized version of reality.