| Sumario: | Based primarily on Winterbach's novel of the Anglo-Boer War titled Niggie in Afrikaans and translated into English as To Hell W ith Cronjé, this paper examines the novel as a site of what I am calling "Boer melancholia." I apply this term to grieving on the part of many Afrikaners, occasioned by a sense of cultural loss -- loss of power, identity, linguistic hegemony -- experienced with the demise of apartheid. I argue that in the novel and in broader Afrikaner culture, this loss revives the memory of prior loss (defeat) in the Anglo-Boer War. Niggie attests to a "melancholic" condition arising from what Freud called the loss of an abstraction, "such as fatherland, freedom, an ideal," a loss analogous to that of a loved person. In the novel, abstract and personal losses are continuously intertwined with one another, as are individual histories of mourning and melancholia. I contrast this narrative of repeated, unredeemed loss with the fantasy of recovery -- of the "liberating" comeback -- embodied, for instance, in the popular music video De la Rey by Bok van Blerk (2006). Winterbach's novel constitutes both a critical fiction of Boer resistance and defeat, and a reflection on Afrikaner history without any comeback.
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