Preface
My fascination with language and translation have shaped my life since early childhood. I was born in South Africa in 1985 under a state of national emergency and left in 1988 when my father took up his first diplomatic posting abroad. We returned on New Year’s Eve 1994 – just in time to see out the year of South Africa’s first democratic elections. Moving between Pretoria, London, New York, and Vienna, I was immersed in English and German, while Afrikaans – the language of my parents and my cultural inheritance, the language that came to be emblematic of the apartheid regime back home – was at once familiar and, initially, strangely elusive. These early experiences shaped my awareness of identity as socially and historically constructed, and always mediated by language.
Along the way, I learned to inhabit multiple linguistic ‘skins’, switching them out as occasion demanded. They helped me traverse different cultural and historical contexts, but I was never quite the same person in each. And because I wore them only imperfectly, they brought my other linguistic identities into focus. Perversely, I never felt more Afrikaans than when I attended German schools, both in Austria and, later, in Pretoria. I was never more English – or should I say American – than among Afrikaners during my first formal schooling in the language at the age of thirteen. Yet I also discovered, to my relief at the age of eight – about to transfer from the American International School to the local Volksschule without being able to speak German – that the signifiers for ‘elephant’ were similar in all three languages. From this I learnt that language is not only a site of difference but also of communality – both real, in a shared lexicon, and imagined, in the comfort such overlaps afford.
This book grew out of the project ‘Cultural relations between Switzerland and South Africa, 1948–1994’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, hosted at the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB) and launched in 2019. My task was to investigate Afrikaans translations of Swiss plays staged during apartheid. My focus has fallen on the works of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch, not from any claim to their pre-eminence among post-war German-language playwrights, but from the fact that their plays were the Swiss works most frequently performed in apartheid South Africa. From the 1960s up until 1980, they reached Afrikaans stages despite international cultural boycotts. There, progressive directors and translators seized on them as vehicles for smuggling fresh ideas into an increasingly stifling intellectual climate. It is in this tension – between complicity and resistance – that my book finds its point of departure.
A musicologist by training, I came to theatre research through my late husband, Athol Fugard. While I approach the events and plays discussed in this book from a vantage point far removed from the white theatremakers and audiences of apartheid South Africa – as, indeed, from Frisch and Dürrenmatt – I am perhaps unusually equipped to do so. For a decade and a half, I worked alongside a writer whose plays featured prominently in the struggle against apartheid and who grappled with many of the questions raised in this book.
My acknowledgements must begin here – with deep gratitude to Athol who helped me make sense of these questions and who furnished me with a map of the emotional landscape of apartheid. Equally important were his encouragement and patient waiting while I researched and wrote. I completed this book just two months before he died. And yet, I have not dedicated it to him, but to our infant son who was turning over in my belly, writing himself even as I wrote its last chapters.
I am grateful to Chris Walton, project leader, teacher, and friend, without whom this book would not exist. My interviewees – Pieter Fourie, Mannie Manim, Johan Esterhuizen, Marius Scholtz, Henriette Lemmer, Stéphanie Brink, and Michèle Schiess – shared their memories, insights, and archival documents with great generosity. I also benefited from the invaluable assistance of Margaret Schiess, Celesté Reynolds (Artscape Archive), Gabriele Mohale (Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand), Annelien Diedericks (National Afrikaans Literary Museum and Research Centre), Pakama Ncume (Stellenbosch University library), and my research assistant Astrid Schwenke. Finally, I thank Temple Hauptfleisch, Louis Gaigher, Danie Stander, Friedl Kreuser, Isabel dos Santos, Stephanus Muller, Petrus du Preez, Elsje Fourie, Lizabé Lambrechts, Willemien Froneman, Jasper Walgrave, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Gunther Pakendorf and Oloff de Wet for their expertise, insights, and steady support.
In writing this book, I have drawn extensively on my three linguistic ‘skins’, approaching the subject now as an insider, an Afrikaner, and now as an outsider raised in German and English. Yet as an insider, I have always felt somewhat on the outside because of my history as a particular kind of insider. In an ironic twist, the children of diplomats working for the apartheid state were given international educations quite unlike the nationalist-orientated Afrikaans ones of their peers back home. By this fact alone, I can never fully claim the outsider position either. My subjectivity, then, has been shaped by continually translating myself in and out of these divergent positions – just as I have done for most of my life.
Where unspecified, all translations are my own.