The National Question in Antjie Krog’s “Transformation Trilogy”*

Abstract

SummaryThis article explores the claim that the South African writer Antjie Krog is in essence asking the National Question in what I have termed her “transformation trilogy”: Country of My Skull (1998); A Change of Tongue (2003); and Begging to Be Black (2009). In writing about issues like “race”, identity and belonging in these texts, Krog is asking, “[t]o whom does the South African nation belong?” – a question that was central to debates about the National Question by liberation movements during apartheid. Although the “new” South Africa arguably is very different from the new “nation” that had been imagined, the National Question remains of importance. A postcolonial reading of the transformation trilogy encourages a focus on the National Question and the factors that complicate it. Existing studies about the theme of nationhood in Krog’s work do not draw connections with older discourses on nation and nationalism in South Africa.