and left me to deal with very trying consequences. But I agree with Mandela when he said: ‘Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.’
In the end, if there is one thing I learned from Mandela and from my own life experiences over the last four and a half decades, it is – in the words sung by Lee Ann Womack – that we should not fear the mountains in the distance or take the paths of least resistance. And when we are given the choice to sit it out or dance, we should always choose to dance.
PART ONE
South Africa
‘I am an African! I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.’
Thabo Mbeki (at the adoption of the new constitution in the Constitutional Assembly, 8 May 1996)
1
Since my earliest memories, my head and my heart seem to have been in a tension-filled dialogue. My intellect, filled with the writings of Shakespeare, the history of colonial powers, and art, music and religion from worlds far away, is most comfortable in the thinking patterns of Europe. Of course, my white skin, and the language I speak, make that even more evident. But something deep inside me has always rebelled against this European identity. Since I was very young, I have known that there is something else, something much deeper. Something that was formed by the red soil of Africa, the thunderstorms, the air, the harshness of the landscape, and the vast diversity of the continent’s people. With time, I have come to understand and accept that I stand with my feet in two worlds: in the Europe of my head and in the Africa of my heart.
Physically, I came into this world at 5:40pm on 18 April 1967 in Die Moedersbond Hospital in Pretoria. It was a turbulent time in South Africa. Almost exactly three years after Mandela’s famous speech from the dock, and his subsequent sentencing to life imprisonment on Robben Island, the National Party government was determined to keep the political insurgency under control by banning, among others, the ANC and PAC.
Seven months earlier, the prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, with whom I would become inextricably linked twenty years later, had been assassinated in parliament. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the military wing of the ANC had increased its activities. In response, the apartheid government passed both the Defence Amendment Bill and the Terrorism Bill in June 1967. This made military service compulsory for white men, and also legalised the detention without trial of anyone who ‘might endanger the maintenance of law and order’. Cut off by the rigorous division between people set up by apartheid, the white population was not really affected by the latter, and celebrated proudly when Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant later that year in Cape Town.
Like Dr Barnard, I know that my ancestors came from Holland centuries ago. However, as with many Afrikaners, the details are a bit hazy. Through an extraordinary piece of research done by Professor Geoffrey Dean from Ireland, I know that I am, on my father’s side, a descendant of Gerrit Jansz and Ariaantje Jacobs. Gerrit Jansz came to the Cape in 1685 as one of the first free burghers sent by the Dutch East India Company to set up a half-way station at the southern point of Africa for the ships going to the Far East. Gerrit was given a piece of land, but had no wife. In 1688, the Lords Seventeen in the Netherlands, who directed the business of the Dutch East India Company, sent out eight female orphans on a ship called China as wives for the free burghers. One of them was Ariaantje Jacobs – or Ariaantje Adriaanse, as she was also known – an orphan from Rotterdam. The plan of the Lords Seventeen seemed to work, since the majority of the women were married within a month. Ariaantje married Gerrit Jansz and together they had eight children. But this is where my knowledge of the story ends.
During 1840, my ancestors must have joined the Great Trek. Bravely – some would argue, stubbornly – they faced enormous obstacles, including disease, war and almost impassable mountain ranges, in the firm belief and hope that their destiny lay somewhere else, free from British domination. This independent, courageous and adventurous spirit seems to be part of the genetic memory of most Afrikaners; it is certainly part of my genes.
But it was my maternal grandmother who ultimately had the biggest influence in my life. Our relationship was simple: I completely adored her and she completely adored me. A small but strong and determined woman, she had an extremely sharp mind and a great sense of humour. I loved nothing more than spending time with her on my grandparents’ farm. During the day, I followed her when she collected the eggs and watched carefully as she made butter, dried peaches, baked bread and rusks, and cooked the most delicious food known to man on the wood-burning Aga stove. I would sit happily with her in the kitchen as she sang along to the religious music on the radio while ironing or cooking. In the afternoon, we would lie outside under the tree on a blanket, hoping to catch a cool breeze, and imagine that we saw human faces in the big white clouds drifting in the seemingly endless African sky.
But it was at night that I felt completely safe and comforted. As soon as I arrived, my grandfather would be exiled to the guest bedroom and I would snuggle up at night against my granny’s back. In the winter, she would tell me endless stories while we lay in the dark, barely able to breathe under the heavy load of blankets. It was through these stories that she instilled the values and beliefs that would inform everything I would do later in life.
‘You come from a line of very strong women,’ she would repeat over and over again. ‘We lead the men. If it wasn’t for us, they would never have made it across the Drakensberg or survived the Boer Wars. Always remember that!’ She would then go on to tell me how my great-grandparents on my mother’s side had settled on a farm called Leeupoort, back when wild lions still roamed freely. She would tell me stories of my ancestors and of my great-grandmother, Helena Gertruida Maria Dreyer, and her marriage to my great-grandfather, Coenraad Jakobus van der Merwe, and how they settled down on Leeupoort, the farm that belonged to my great-great-grandmother. Unconventionally, the women in my family were always the landowners – their husbands joined them on the land.
It was on Leeupoort, in 1915, shortly after the beginning of World War I, that my grandmother was born, the fifth of seven children. She was named after her mother, and was called Lenie for short. But tragedy struck in 1930 when, at the age of 50, my great-grandmother passed away from pneumonia, leaving my grandmother, who was only fifteen at the time, with the responsibility of looking after the family. Her two elder sisters had already left home, so, as the eldest girl, she was expected to leave school and look after her two elder brothers, her teenage sister and her ten-year-old younger brother.
Ten years later, she met my grandfather, Johannes Petrus (Jan) Brandt, at the wedding of her cousin. Unlike my grandmother’s family, my grandfather came from the Cape. He was born in the French Huguenot town of Tulbagh on 21 August 1912. His mother, Helena Jakoba Johanna Louw, and his father, Jakobus Johannes Christiaan Brandt, lived on a farm where Jakobus was a foreman or overseer. Like his bride-to-be, my grandfather never went to high school. His parents were extremely poor and there was only money for one child to study. My grandfather went to work so that his elder brother, Grammie, could continue his studies. While his brother became a geologist, my grandfather worked as a labourer. Eventually his brother, who was working as a geologist on the gold mines in the Transvaal, suggested that he join him and become a miner. So he left the Cape and travelled the thousand miles to the north to work underground; it was during this time that he met my grandmother.
They had a small wedding and went on honeymoon to the Cape, but since my great-grandfather lived with them, he went too! ‘Well, he wanted to see the sea,’ my grandmother would laugh. After their marriage, my grandmother insisted that my grandfather leave the dangerous mine-work. He took up small-scale farming and drove the local school bus as a source of additional income. He subsequently worked at the brick-making factory in the adjacent town, Carletonville, and in his later years he worked
