UWCScholar :: Browsing by Author "Krog, Antjie"

Browsing by Author "Krog, Antjie"

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Current manifestation of trauma experienced during forced removals under apartheid: interviews with a former "Vlakte" inhabitant
(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Hector- Kannemeyer, Renee Allison; Krog, Antjie; Institute for Social Development; Faculty of Arts
Much has been researched in South Africa about the trauma of losing one's home, one's community and rebuilding one's life in a new environment. Several books have been published tracking the lives of the forcibly removed and their responses to leaving District Six. My research focuses on a different group namely those who had been forcibly removed from the centre of Stellenbosch, called Die Vlakte during that time. Living and working with and among people who have experienced this removal, I was keen to research whether the impact of the trauma is currently manifesting in this specific community and if so, what the symptoms would be. This qualitative inquiry focuses on one particular individual, Mr. Hilton Biscombe. I selected him because he, who experienced the removal as a teenager, spent most of his later life determinedly collecting stories and documents relating to this incident. Mr. Biscombe is also the only person of whom I am aware who responded personally through compiling a book, making a DVD, writing poetry as well as an autobiography relating to this event. My inquiry into the ways trauma manifests in a narrative, will be based on two interviews: one conducted by a white man from the University of Stellenbosch thirty years after the event; and another interview, six years later, conducted by myself.Our understanding of trauma is usually associated with a death or injury or the possibility thereof, but it could also include the victims response to extreme fear, serious harm or threat to family members. According to van der Merwe and Vienings, people also become traumatized when witnessing harm, physical violence or death or the sudden loss or destruction of a victim's home (van der Merwe Vienings, 2001). So the issue of trauma is not in question, nor the fact that forced removals cause trauma. I am exploring testimony in the form of interviews for possible current manifestations of this trauma thirty-six years down the line.
Current manifestation of trauma experienced during forced removals under apartheid: interviews with a former �VLAKTE� inhabitant
(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Kannemeyer, Renee Allison Hector; Krog, Antjie
Much has been researched in South Africa about the trauma of losing one�s home, one�s community and rebuilding one�s life in a new environment. Several books have been published tracking the lives of the forcibly removed and their responses to leaving District Six. My research focuses on a different group namely those who had been forcibly removed from the centre of Stellenbosch, called �Die Vlakte� during that time.Living and working with and among people who have experienced this removal, I was keen to research whether the impact of the trauma is currently manifesting in this specific community and if so, what the symptoms would be. This qualitative inquiry focuses on one particular individual, Mr. Hilton Biscombe. I selected him because he, who experienced the removal as a teenager, spent most of his later life determinedly collecting stories and documents relating to this incident. Mr.Biscombe is also the only person of whom I am aware who responded personally through compiling a book, making a DVD, writing poetry as well as an autobiography relating to this event. My inquiry into the ways trauma manifests in a narrative, will be based on two interviews: one conducted by a white man from the University of Stellenbosch thirty years after the event; and another interview, six years later, conducted by myself.Our understanding of trauma is usually associated with a death or injury or the possibility thereof, but it could also include the victim�s response to extreme fear, serious harm or threat to family members. According to van der Merwe and Vienings, people also become traumatized when witnessing harm, physical violence or death or the sudden loss or destruction of a victim�s home (van der Merwe & Vienings, 2001).So the issue of trauma is not in question, nor the fact that forced removals cause trauma. I am exploring testimony in the form of interviews for possible current manifestations of this trauma thirty-six years down the line.
�The Gwarrie Call that they Recognise�: An analysis of the translated Sesotho poem �Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914� (War against Germany 1914) by BM Khaketla (1913�2001)
(Taylor and Francis, 2021) Krog, Antjie
This essay looks at a recently translated poem, �Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914�, written by BM Khaketla, as a lens through which to approach the feelings and attitudes of people from Lesotho towards the world wars. A poem is sometimes described as a gathering of spoken or written words, arranged in such a way that it evokes an intense imaginative alertness around an issue, an emotion or an experience. Investigations into the participation of black South Africans in the world wars mainly rest on official archival documentation, with attention focused on the racial, socio-economic context and the post-war treatment of soldiers. Distinction is seldom made between black South Africans and those from Lesotho (or Swaziland or Botswana) as they were all drafted under the South African contingents. There has been little discussion in South African art about why black people joined the Allied forces during the world wars, with the prominence of the sinking of the SS Mendi a wonderful exception as it reverberates in SEK Mqhayi's famous poem, �Ukutshona kuka Mendi�, as well as Fred Khumalo's recent novel, Dancing the Death Drill (2017). The visual artist William Kentridge has also commemorated the death of very large numbers of black Africans in the First World War in his powerful exhibition, The Head and the Load. This article explores the expression of emotions and conclusions about the world wars in a poem by Khaketla, as well as the techniques he uses to carry these across larger vistas.
I am not a colour: A novella
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Gcwadi, Madoda; Krog, Antjie
Nobathembu lifts her hand and waves at her neighbour. She is watering spinach in her garden with a jug from a bucket. At age sixty-nine, her beauty shines. The sun is high on the echoes of Nyanga village – echoes of barking, the neighing of nearby donkeys, a truck against a slope. Two butterflies mate in her thorn tree. In their hearts the story begins. Their wings brighten and in their own time they disappear, following their peculiar rhythms.
Last Word: What does �hospitality� really mean?
(Duke University Press, 2018) Krog, Antjie
115 Last year I filled out an endless number of forms on the internet and had my photo taken this way for an American visa, that way for a Schengen one, another way for Britain. I stood in queues to gather freshly stamped documents from my bank, certificates from the revenue service, municipal verification that I own property, a letter confirming my long-term employment, payment slips, certificates of health, insurance, and so on. During face-to-face interviews I felt as if every government agent wanted to tell me: We know you�you sly, diseased, and poverty-stricken person, wanting permission to come and sponge off our social security system, to abuse our precious freedoms with your fundamentalist ideas, and to infect our population with your third-world unworthiness.
�� Oi, oi! � you must go by the right path�: Mofolo�s Chaka revisited via the original text
(University of Pretoria, 2016) Krog, Antjie
Thomas Mofolo never defended himself against accusations that his novel Chaka distorts historical facts to express anti-Nguni sentiments under the guise of Christianity. But in a way he foreshadowed the possibility of it, by including as part of his novel a sentence which has become one of his most analysed: �But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his [Chaka�s] life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose�. Mofolo does not elaborate on what he means by �our present purpose�, but simply continues with the story. By focusing on the original Sesotho text, indigenous Zulu customs, African philosophy and the diversions from historical facts, this article explores other possibilities for what could have been Mofolo�s �present purpose�.
Some new perspectives on the Soweto uprising: H. M. L. Lentsoane�s poem �Black Wednesday� (�Laboraro le lesoleso�)
(Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association, 2022) Krog, Antjie
The epic poem about the Soweto uprising, �Laboraro le lesoleso�, written in Sepedi (Northern Sotho) by H. M. L. Lentsoane has only recently been translated into English by Biki Lepota as �Black Wednesday� and published in the anthology Stitching a whirlwind (2018). In this article I suggest that, by discarding English, some crucial shifts from the bulk of protest poetry written in English must have taken place. Lentsoane wants to speak directly to fellow mother tongue speakers and not a national or broader African or international ear.
'This thing called reconciliation�' Forgiveness as part of an interconnectedness-towards-wholeness
(Philosophical Society of Southern Africa, 2008) Krog, Antjie
Regular reference is made, within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the fact that ubuntu, an indigenous world view, played a role in the process. This paper tries to show that despite these references, important analysts of the TRC (as well as many South Africans) had insufficiently accounted for this worldview in their critical readings of the Commission�s work and therefore found aspects of the process incoherent and/or morally and legally confused. I am not arguing that the TRC was not a deeply flawed process, but want to establish how powerfully this indigenous world view brought a coherency that not only enabled the TRC to do its work without incidences of revenge, but imbued politically and legally trapped concepts with new possibilities. The pervasiveness of this world view within eg. the second round of TRC testimonies is noticeable and show how often the critique on the TRC fails to take this dominant role into account and how many, seemingly contradictory or confusing, positions become coherent when regarded within this worldview. This view of interconnectedness, consistently expressed throughout the life of the commission, has wide implications for the interpretation of healing, the asking of amnesty, the rehabilitation of perpetrators, the interdependence of forgiveness and reconciliation in the process of achieving full personhood within a healed society. In the footsteps of Richard Bell, this paper locates this world view within a particular framework formulated as ubuntu by Desmond Tutu, as communitarianism by Kwame Gyekye, as ethnophilosophy by Paulin Hountondji etc. The paper also tries to understand how this interconnected moral self is formed and who the community could or should be that influences this moral self.
To Write Liberty
(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Krog, Antjie
The keynote for the International Conference, Writing for Liberty, held in Cape Town in 2017 is a response to the contradictory demands made on writers: to respond to the suffering in the world and to refrain from appropriating the pain of the marginalised. Taking a cue from Isaiah Berlin�s analysis of the two kinds of liberties: liberty to be free and liberty from interference with freedom, an argument is made for the freedom of a writer to write what she wants. This freedom is radically tempered in a reading of some novels by JM Coetzee. Here I explore the quality of skill, anguish and powerlessness to which a writer has to submit within the structure of her text.
We dare not say
(University of the Western Cape, 2016) Lange, Janine Carol; Krog, Antjie
We Dare Not Say is an anthology of seven interlinked short stories with the general theme of intergenerational trauma among coloured families in Cape Town. The stories are arranged in a montage of internally, variably and externally focalised narratives that span over a century, from 1900 through to 2015, and are fictionalised accounts of real events, categorising them as biographical fiction. Some of the specific topics covered in the stories include incest, molestation, substance abuse, mental illness and humour as a coping mechanism. The body of work is conceived in the context of the twentieth century trauma narrative, the complexities of which run as undercurrents through most of the important English literary works created in South Africa since the 1800s up until John M. Coetzee, but which has often lacked a female perspective, especially women of colour. The stories in this volume aim to depict a group of people, who, through centuries of oppression in the form of serfdom, servitude and segregation, have developed various coping mechanisms to make sense of their own identity in an absurdly cruel social landscape. The stories focus on the inward turning of violence, substance abuse, silence and humour as survival mechanisms after generations of trauma that have been, in a sense, the hallmarks of coloured South Africa. The stories are told using a split narrative method, showing multiple viewpoints of the same story with perspectives ranging from young to old, crossing the gender divide in both time and space. Ultimately, We Dare Not Say, is a depiction of the complexities of lives lived under oppression, and the triumphs and challenges faced in trying to resolve, live through or deny the effects of such oppression on a group and the individuals that make up that group.

Browsing by Author "Krog, Antjie"

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