Michiel Heyns’s &lt;i&gt;Lost Ground&lt;/i&gt;: The white man’s sense of identity and place in a decolonised Africa and a democratic South Africa

Renate Lenz

doi:10.4102/lit.v38i1.1329

Abstract

In Lost Ground, Michiel Heyns portrays the former white settlers’ position and experience in South Africa, Africa and Europe after the overturn of South Africa’s apartheid regime. An analysis of the novel illustrates that the legacy of the colonisation of Africa and apartheid in South Africa still shapes the settler descendants’ perception of self and the other and the formers’ place in South Africa and Africa. After the electoral victory of the African National Congress, contemporary white South African men, as exemplified by the English-speaking male protagonist who features in the novel, tend to dissociate themselves from the country and the African continent as home. Although the original colonisers’ experience of alienation and ambivalence about apartheid has been widely depicted, the significance of this experience in relation to white South African male identity has not been fully explored in a study of Heyns’s Lost Ground, principally as regards the novel’s detective narrative framework and the counterdiscursive technique of intertextual referencing that implies other interpretative possibilities. Lost Ground will be critically analysed in terms of the central character’s experience of space and place, and the influence of these paradigms on Peter Jacobs as he makes strides towards abandoning historical/racial restrictions and locating his identity in people.

Highlights

Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground (2011) reflects on some of the major issues expressed in contemporary South African literature, namely the original white male colonisers’ or settlers’ sense of identity and perception of their standing in the ‘new’ South Africa, the African continent and Europe
Since control of the country has been surrendered to its black citizens, white South African men, as exemplified by Heyns’s protagonist Peter Jacobs, for the most part, are no longer able to configure their subjectivity as master of the estate and in opposition to others
When Peter Jacobs leaves South Africa to dodge serving in the army, he follows in the footsteps of his mother who defected from volk en vaderland by marrying a British Jew – judged to be an other to the Afrikaner self

Summary

Introduction

Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground (2011) reflects on some of the major issues expressed in contemporary South African literature, namely the original white male colonisers’ or settlers’ sense of identity and perception of their standing in the ‘new’ South Africa, the African continent and Europe. Both Blik and his wife, akin to the majority of the white population of Alfredville, will not re-evaluate past discourses of self and other and forge a new post-colonial cultural identity for themselves (Jacobs 2013:3).

Results

Conclusion