Voortrekkers of the Cold War: Enacting the South African Past and Present in Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples

Abstract

“Communism [is] the highest form of capitalism”—the head of the South African Security Branch, Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh declared in 1966, in a nonchalant statement that short-circuited the staple binaries of Cold War discourse (Bunting 1969).2 The officer’s political illiteracy aside, his oxymoronic formulation may actually unwittingly reveal points of convergence in the discursive strategies churned out by communism and capitalism supporters alike. Singular as it might seem, this curious little sentence speaks of a larger conundrum that placed South Africa in an uneasy ideological spot between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Cold War. With its uncomfortable position in relation to western capitalism and Soviet communism, South Africa becomes a privileged site for exploring Cold War contradictions. These contradictions become most explicit in the simplified ideological positions distilled for young Afrikaners, who were trained into proper citizens of the nation during the apartheid years. Surprisingly, there are not many literary texts written after the fall of the Iron Curtain that engage with the impact of the Cold War in South Africa.