LANGUAGE OF RESISTANCE: Max du Preez, Youth Day and my discovery of another Afrikaans

The journalist and writer Max du Preez taught many Afrikaners that they did not need to reject Afrikaans; he simply helped them discover another Afrikaans.

For many South Africans, 16 June 1976 and Afrikaans are forever linked. On that day, schoolchildren in Soweto marched against the apartheid government’s plans to impose Afrikaans as a language of instruction in “black” schools. The state responded with violence. Young people died. Images from that day travelled around the world and exposed the brutality of apartheid in a way that few events had done before.

In Aanstap Boere: ’n Ooggetuie van die Ontrafeling van Wit Mag in Suid-Afrika (Step Forward Boers: An Eyewitness to the Unravelling of White Power in South Africa), Max du Preez reflects on 16 June 1976 and argues that it was one of the decisive turning points in South African history — the beginning of the end of apartheid.

Reading those pages on Youth Day made me think again about Afrikaans, my own journey, and the role Du Preez played in it.

I was a theology student at the University of Pretoria when the Dakar Conference took place in 1987. Today, it is difficult to explain the reaction that followed. White South Africans met publicly with the ANC in exile. In many Afrikaans circles, the participants were branded naïve, dangerous or simply traitors. For many Afrikaners, the old certainties still held. For me, however, questions had already started to surface.

Around that time, the newspaper Vrye Weekblad, edited by Du Preez, was launched, and every Friday I bought a copy. The stories about death squads, covert operations and the abuses of the apartheid state were important because they forced many of us to confront realities that had been hidden, denied or explained away. Yet what stayed with me even more was something else.

Through Vrye Weekblad I discovered the Afrikaans literature of the Sestigers — writers such as Jan Rabie, André P Brink, Etienne Leroux and Breyten Breytenbach, whose work challenged the moral assumptions of apartheid long before many Afrikaners were prepared to do so. Later, I would also discover the work of writers and poets such as Ingrid Jonker, Karel Schoeman and Antjie Krog, who formed part of the same broader tradition of dissent within Afrikaans culture.

When many of these writers produced their most important work, I was too young to appreciate what they were doing. It was only later, through reading Vrye Weekblad, that I started engaging seriously with them.

What struck me was not simply that they opposed apartheid. What struck me was that they represented