De La Rey

The Afrikaner Flame Flares Up
How a simple song has divided and conquered South Africa

‘A handful of us against an army of them’

It is the biggest selling South African album ever, and it is still causing a national sensation. The first time I heard Bok van Blerk’s song was in a church. My Afrikaans girlfriend had been nagging me for weeks to go to church. I don’t remember too much of the sermon, but I do remember Van Blerk’s song, De La Rey. It is about a legendary Boer General who fought overwhelming numbers of better equipped British troops during the Anglo Boer War more than a century ago. The words of the song by Bok van Blerk become supremely relevant for two reasons:

1) The Afrikaner (and I think white people here in general) have suffered incredible odds for as long as they have been in Africa, and there is a tremendous heroism in having survived what we have that the song identifies and recognizes
2) This line: ‘De La Rey De La Rey, sal jy die Boere kom lei? De La Rey De La Rey’ translates powerfully and meaningfully in the modern era in South Africa, even the world. It means: General de La Rey, will you come and lead us?

Even as I write this a swarm of energy burns along my spine, and I know everyone in that all white congregation that day felt the same way. Well, they should, since it’s a song about the Boer, the Afrikaner. Why then does it fan the flame inside me? After all, I am not even an Afrikaner.

His Story

By all accounts I should be. Most people in Bloemfontein, where I live, are Afrikaners, and the vast majority of white people with Dutch surnames (or at least, non-British) in South Africa are Afrikaans speaking. I’m an unusual South African in that I have a Dutch heritage, on my father’s side, and a British and Afrikaans heritage on my mother’s. Most of my forbears were here before the War, and we certainly came far too late to have any claim to that other Afrikaans tradition, the Great Trek.
Although my father spoke Dutch as an infant, he made the unusual transition from Dutch to English, simply because he was sent to a local English school in the predominantly Afrikaans city of Bloemfontein. My grandmother (on my mother’s side) married an Englishman, and thus my mother tongue remains English to this day.

History

I went to a school in the bad old Apartheid days. It was an all white school, but nevertheless segregated along language/cultural lines: one third of all students were English, and two third Afrikaans. We had our own classes, and for the most part the big Afrikaners played tough games like rugby while the English kids (who were usually smaller and more timid) played hockey and soccer. So, despite me being a van der Leek, I had my lessons in English. During history classes at one time, we learnt of the Boer War, and my classmates and I considered ourselves Boers, because a hundred years ago the British were certainly not our friends, and the country didn’t belong to them. South Africa was merely the outskirts of the British Empire, like plenty of other colonies at the time. I sympathized with the terrible suffering the Boer woman went through in British concentration camps, and I hated the British for their scorched Earth policy. Of course, the Boer’s did not only have to deal with attacks from the British, but also from staggering hordes of Xhosa and Zulu impi’s, armed with spears and shields. But van Blerk’s song is about the Boer General fighting the British. In a time when your weapon was a musket that took more than a minute to load, and often did not work, the odds were very much against the Boers.
And yet, as farmers and frontiersmen they became intimate with their land, becoming keen and strong and for a time very successful guerillas in the field of battle.

Dutchmen vs Rooinek

If I considered myself a Boer (in the context of the War) the Afrikaners I went to school with didn’t think of me in the same way. They would call my friends rooinek (red neck), when they heard us speaking English, and when they heard my surname, they would ask me why I didn’t speak Afrikaans. Meanwhile, the English kids called the Afrikaners Dutchmen, which left me uncomfortably out of place, but in a sense, gave me a perpetually unbiased white man’s vista. Sometimes kids would come up to me and ask: “Which sport is the toughest: rugby or soccer?” There was always a lot more imbedded in that question than the question itself.

Resistance

It took me a number of years to become fluent at Afrikaans, and of course it helped having an Afrikaans girlfriend. So why does this Afrikaans song, for Afrikaans people, strike a chord in the hearts of so many here? Why has the impact been assessed as far afield as the New York Times? Well, because this song is not ironic, or funny or even clever. For starters, it is a damn good song. It also has a simple militancy about it, which infects those who hear it. For the first time in many years, the Afrikaner and other white people are recognizing themselves as a group once again. And the song is about standing up. It’s about resistance. It’s about a heritage of both those things, and until now, we’d all but forgotten about it.

‘With the cliffs of the mountains against our backs
They think they can run us down’

While the country has been given over to Affirmative Action, the spoils carved up and sold out to Black Empowerment and all the rest that this entails, the original custodians of the country, the once powerful but now meek – those who have not yet been murdered – have been quietly smouldering on the back burner. You might not think that white South Africans have a place in a country called South Africa, until you see how these people respond to this song. If you weren’t sure how white South Africans felt about their place in their country, watch them get fired up by this song. And indeed, one of the lines in the song (translated) goes:
‘But the flame and the fire that once burned
now burns deep, deep inside me’.

I was at a braai recently when the song was played again and again and again. My girlfriend’s brother, a big Afrikaans guy, and an excellent rugby player in his day, called me over and put his arm around my shoulder. A few of us, drunk on beer, with the coals throwing off swirling smoke around our faces, sang, shouted the words of the song.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to go to the songwriters or even Bok van Blerk (real name Louis Pepler, a 28 year old from Pretoria) to ask them why they wrote the song, or what they were trying to say. Because it is a very simple song, telling a very simple story. I do think it is appropriate that people notice what the song does to them personally. We can try to explain that.

‘Because my wife and my child are forced into prison to die’

Leadership Vacuum

My personal experience is that the song strikes plenty of chords. It is about the suffering and the struggle of white people merely to get on with their lives in Africa. It is about the very real need we have for a leader, for ourselves as a group, but even for our country. The white nation went into mourning when our cricket captain, Hansie Cronje died in an aeroplane crash. We have no powerful political or religious leaders that are worth listening to. We feel that loss. Crime whips and wounds and devastates the collective white community on a daily basis. And how do the people here respond to all this? Hundreds of thousands, millions, have already left their country because of the interminable, unbearable pressure. And I too, am thinking of moving to Perth, Australia, in the next two years. I have already spent 2 years in Britain and 4 years in South Korea. The constant crime means we don’t feel safe in our homes, and each day, the newspapers have more news that pushes us down.

‘As the enemy overruns us again, we are forced to take a stand’

But while I am here, in my country, the country that I and my family was born and raised, I welcome people like myself taking a stand against the forces that seem to be forever pushing us. For me it is not about yearning for Apartheid, it is not about racism, but pushing back against the constant slights and terrible blows that keep reigning down on us. I don’t mind standing by the Afrikaner. When I was in Scotland, I felt a similar desire to be Scottish, and to subscribe to many things Scottish. You don’t have to be of a particular nationality to be inspired, but I suppose it helps. De La Rey is about the sharing of real suffering, and the conviction, the rallying call to stand up against it. How the Afrikaners will stand, is another question altogether. I personally hope that there will be some kind of asserting of personal standards, or even a revolution, if only a cultural one.
In a country where the vice president sings songs about ‘Bring me my machine gun’ outside a court (on first rape, them corruption charges), where ‘farm murder’ literally means farmer’s (the same Boers a hundred years later, still fighting for their lives) are targeted and butchered, it does seem necessary that someone takes a stand. Perhaps it is enough that all the song ever achieves is that white South Africans literally stand up, together, and make their presence felt and heard in this country. De La Rey is a cry that belongs to all people at one time or another, but right now, it’s the Afrikaner that deserves recognition and respect. At the very least, we owe them our admiration, not for their sins, but for their fire.