The Cafe de Move-on Blues by Christopher Hope

Author:Christopher Hope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

18

‘You speak good Afrikaans for a Frenchman.’

The compliment came from a man uneasy about seeing his real name in print, so I will call him Jan. On an autumn morning under a brilliant blue sky, we were sitting over a cup of coffee in the all-White Afrikaner enclave of Orania. Jan was around thirty and lived in Bloemfontein, 130 miles away. He’d been in town for a few days to test the water, and all he had seen made him keen to move to Orania.

When Jan asked me where I lived, I told him I lived in France and it drew from him the compliment on my Afrikaans. I would have explained that I went to school in Pretoria and learnt to speak the language, as everyone did, if they needed to understand the vagaries and comedies of South Africa’s capital city, with its thousands of Afrikaner bureaucrats who directed all aspects of our lives. But he seemed uninterested in how it was that a Frenchman was speaking his language. France was a good place, and a republic; the Huguenots, from whom he descended, were French and, above all, France was not England.

He had been boarding with an Orania family, and liked the place mightily but for one problem.

‘Not enough girls, not enough action.’

‘Not enough reality, maybe?’ I wondered.

He shrugged. ‘Who needs reality? In Orania you don’t lock your windows and won’t be murdered in your bed.’

His earnest, edgy manner took me back to the sixties and seventies, when conversations quickly turned into confrontations and linguistic skirmishes. When what counted was not detail but dogma, faith not facts. Loudly repeated beliefs had been the aggressive mood music of the Verwoerd and Vorster years, and those years pressed close in Orania.

Jan was curious: ‘So what do you think of us, here?’

‘A lot of the time I think you’re on a hiding to nothing. At other times, I’m not so sure. Orania reminds me of what I saw in ex-Yugoslavia. During the wars of the nineties, when the country split into tribal reservations, ethnic islands.’

Jan was pleased. ‘They got homelands: Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and so on. Right? That’s apartheid, isn’t it, hey?’

I agreed that the dissolution of Yugoslavia into ethnic enclaves looked rather like the old South Africa patchwork of tribal ‘homelands’. Was that what he wanted for Orania?

‘We want what everyone has the right to ask for,’ said Jan. ‘To choose your own kind, your own family. Look at what happened in Yugoslavia, and you’d know that Dr Verwoerd was right. Mixed populations don’t work. India split from Pakistan. Serbs from Croats. Czechs from Slovaks. You can’t force folks to mix.’

I had been visiting Orania ever since its founder, Carel Boshoff, bought in 1991 an abandoned settlement of pre-fabricated houses near the Orange River that had once housed workers on an irrigation project. On 445 hectares of unwanted semi-desert in the Northern Cape, he hoped to establish a forward base to preserve the White Afrikaner tribe from approaching extinction. It seemed a wacky idea, like sending ill-equipped astronauts to some far-off planet.

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