“For us Afrikaans was a deed of rescue. You wanted to use it as well as you could to rescue yourself and other Afrikaners from poverty and misery. Teachers saw to it that we mastered scientific and classical Afrikaans. We had to learn Afrikaans poems and Bible verses off by heart, and so pure sentence structure and vocabulary were bedded in us. Anglicisms were like cursing. You delighted in storytellers who could play with language. They were heard again and again and their stories retold so often that the unique expressions were extended to everybody.”

War eludes grasping. It is as if you & the men around you perpetually strive to impose order on the chaos of something untransmittable. Only men like De Wet, you think, comprehend the war to its full extent. We, beset daily by events that defy reality, can later make no sense of anything. We are merely a crumb tumbling in a saddlebag as somebody gallops away.

I see God comes towards me through mud.

God has no ears.

He stares with blunt & lashless eyes.

A victim has no stake in a future (as many Afrikaaners feel now), but a proud loser does. He wants to build. He wants to arrange a dispensation for his people. But when Afrikaners identify as victims, they become useless to society.

One morning Breyten spoke to us: “You need nobody’s permission to join the struggle. Guilt feelings and self-flagellation are self-indulgent sentiments, but understanding of responsibilities gets you moving. It is in walking that you learn how to walk. Watch out for the exultation of the camel-hair shirt. Clean out the cellars, watch out for the corruption of suffering, of self-pity. Don’t go and sell yourselves as brave warriors. To be against apartheid is not heroic, it’s normal.”

With the black government being so corrupt— dear Lord— the amount of shame and embarrassment that it causes black people, almost a second humiliation after apartheid— I never criticise along with white people. Never. Even though I can see they want me to.