I was brought up semi-schizo, with my Afrikaans mother and very English dad and going to a super-conservative Afrikaans school while living in an English suburb. But that was nothing compared to what was going down a few years later, when the “struggle” really came to a head in urban environs. By that time I had gone forth and multiplied, had published verse in my beloved mother tongue, and considered myself one of the Afrikaans avant-garde (or avant-guano, as my friends and I preferred to call it, as most of our ideals had been shot to shit by the ardent right wing fools). And even then I saw the death-knell coming.

I still wrote in Afrikaans, doggedly, but found myself using English as a lingua-franca in my daily life. One was proud of one’s work, but disgusted at what our poor co-opted culture had been reduced to by a minority of blind idiots with big guns and bigger chips on their shoulders. So I became embarrassed by my culture. Not for what it really was, but for the hideous crimes that were being perpetrated “in the name of the Afrikaner”. So I started to draw distinctions. I was no Afrikaner, though I spoke and loved the language. Now really, when one is forced into that sort of nitpicking, then the stench over Denmark has spread much too far.

So how could I encourage my children to use the language of the oppressor? Their feelings were unformed. Not political, really, yet…. But still they were embarrassed by the language and chose not to speak it, and I chose not to embarrass them by intimating my origins (easy enough with a surname like Hawkins – who’d know a “filthy Dutchman” lurked beneath?). But this isn’t on. I could not sit idly by and watch the slow puncture administered to my culture by the rabid few, and so I kept writing, as I still do, and I still pride myself in my work in Afrikaans.

And I grow increasingly pleased to see and hear more and more people of all colours and creeds using, abusing and playing with the wonderfully playful and colourful language I love so much and which seems to be ready to survive the crippling blows dealt to it by it’s own people.

And so I would like to close this with a poem I consider quite iconic to my thinking at the time – around 1990.

witbrood (raak nou duur)

ek koop my oes kultuur halfprys
maar darem tuisgebak
my woorde ondeurdig met voorbedagte raad gepleeg
intens soos hartkloppens
deurdig die ruk van holtes voor my oog

ek hakkel tussen woorde deur die seer
die groot hartseer wat oor my aarde witbors maak
my ore dor van daardie hees gelag
vind slaap my moeilik soos ek dongas deur gedagtegange trap

want my trane loop hol oor jou bokkie
en los is al my snare