'I am a living contradiction – a white African'
Daniel Nelson
I, Arikaner
Image by I, Afrikaner
How wrong I was. It’s a tender, revealing, sad, frightening, moving, courageous film.
Filmmaker Annalet ‘Makkie’ Steenkamp (“I am a living contradiction – a white African”) has turned the camera on her own family and produced a portrait that is both human and historic.
“My family believes God promised them this land,” she says.
But other South Africans believe the land was stolen from them and want it back.
“A Boer has land and faith. They are one thing: you cannot separate them,” explains grandma Hester at the beginning of the film.
Hester loves the farm – it’s her life – “but it’s too dangerous to live there now.”
She moves out after producing a submachine-gun when robbers broke into the house and put a gun to grandpa’s head.
“I don’t think we have a future here,” she admits.
“I think they are going to force us off the farms,” says the wife of one of Steenkamp’s brothers.
It’s a far cry from the white idyll conjured up in the early home movies which are available to Steenkamp.
Her film is about the family – their childhoods, the weddings, the births and deaths, the drinking, the culture, the farm, the relationships with each other and with the farm workers. It’s touching but sad because you can see, and you know that they see it, too, that history has passed them by. They stood implacably in the way of black advancement, but the incoming tide of majority rule simply washed round them, leaving them as forlorn, irrelevant islands in the midst of a torrent.
Boer toughness is legendary, and like any farming community they are practical and down-to-earth. But there’s humour, too, which when combined with earthiness takes unexpected forms: the water at the bottom of a grave as the coffin is lowered provokes the comment, “That’s why I say you should be buried in a swimming costume.”
There’s also racism: “Thank God no black hands ever touched me”. And over the carcass of a shot jackal: “It’s the only thing in Africa that causes more trouble than a black.”
But anger seems pointless. Such comments, such people, now simply seem out of place and out of time.
In the end even Steenkamp’s optimistic niece, the Sotho-speaking Shanel, a child of the democratic era, a friend of the farm workers, is affected by the sometimes gruesome violence experienced by a number of white farmers. Nevertheless, her attitude offers a glimmer of hope that the New South Africa is not an empty promise.
· I, Afrikaner is showing at the London Film festival at the Ritzy cinema on 12 October (8pm) and 14 October at the BFI Southbank (3.30pm)
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