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Boer Melancholia: Ingrid Winterbach's Niggie.

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 s...

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Published in:English in Africa Vol. 44; no. 1; pp. 15 - 34
Main Author: Crewe, Jonathan
Format: Literary Criticism
Published: Institute for the Study of English in Africa Apr2017
Subjects:
Niggie (Book)
Winterbach, Ingrid
Apartheid
Culture
Mental depression
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Boer Melancholia: Ingrid Winterbach's Niggie.
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        au: Crewe, Jonathan
      su:
        Niggie (Book)
        Winterbach, Ingrid
        Apartheid
        Culture
        Mental depression
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          Niggie (Book)
          Winterbach, Ingrid
          Apartheid
          Culture
          Mental depression
      keyword:
        Anglo-Boer War
        anti-romance
        modern war novel
        mourning and melancholia
        post-apartheid
        psychoanalysis
      ab: 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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    language: English
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