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 in the mills in the closest town, Fochville.
My grandfather was a big, quiet man. He had enormous hands, hardened by years of working the land. But he had a soft heart. He announced one day that he would no longer shoot the pig he used to feed daily to fatten up until the fatal day. He felt it was a betrayal of his bond with the pig, and told my grandmother that she could do it if she felt that strongly about eating pork. From then on, they bought their pork from the local butcher. No one ever left my grandparents’ house without bags of vegetables, and if anyone knocked on their door, they would be given food. Needless to say, the word spread, and my grandfather made very little money from farming!
As I got older, I would follow my grandfather around while he worked in the vegetable fields or with the animals. He taught me how to milk cows and drive a tractor. He tried to teach me to shoot a gun, but I was hopeless at it. I hate guns with a passion and I have never, nor will ever, own a gun. So every time I had to aim, I would close my eyes and of course hit everything except the tin target. My grandfather gave up in exasperation one day after I nearly hit him.
My grandparents had two children. My mother, Helena (also called Lenie), was born in 1943, and her brother Hannes was born in 1949. Like most Afrikaners at that time, my grandparents were extremely poor. The house was basic, without running water or electricity. I was already at school (in the 1970s) when they finally got running water and no longer had to collect it from the river every day. Even better, they had a water-borne sewage system installed, which meant that the long walk to the pit toilet and night pots under the beds were at