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Faith of the Fathers, Sins of the Sons
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20612 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
3,200 Words |
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Judith Chettle
Judith Chettle is a South Africa-born writer, now living in
the United States, and a frequent contributor to The World &
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ANCESTRAL VOICES
Etienne Van Heerden
New York: Viking, 1992
260 pp., $20.00
Originally written in Afrikaans, Ancestral Voices is in one sense the story of a murder in a particular family, the Moolmans of Toorberg farm, but in another it is the history of a people, the Afrikaners of South Africa, who have also been accused of a terrible crime--that "white tribe," whose members as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century were describing themselves as Africans and who by the late twentieth century were regarded as the pariahs of the Western world. But its author, Etienne van Heerden, an acclaimed young Afrikaans writer and currently a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, is now free to make apartheid a metaphor for an age-old response to authority and to outsiders, as he evokes the past, ancient myths, and a landscape unmistakably African in feature and spirit.
Constrained less by the imperative to chronicle the litany of abuse, van Heerden in this novel transforms a familiar factual reality--apartheid--into an allegory, with implications that will resonate long after the old dispensations are history. Like Tatyana Tolstoy, whose own situation is not dissimilar, the author frequently employs magic realism to describe the intersecting lives of the families who live on Toorberg farm. Which is as it should be; for South Africa, with its richly varied landscape, its native mythology inspired by abundant wildlife, and the widespread belief in the power of the ancestors to affect the present, is ideally suited to magic realism. The descriptive nicknames van Heerden gives to characters like Postmaster and Mailbag, two family members who run the village post office, also reflect the warm personal ties still common in rural south Africa, an old-fashioned place where men continue to be respectfully called "Oupa" or "Oom," grandfather or uncle, and women, "Ouma" or "Tannie," grandmother or aunt, as a matter of course by strangers and relatives alike.
Divine punishment
When the novel opens sometime in the recent past, the survival of the present generation of Moolmans on the farm is threatened by an investigation into a murder as well as by a terrible drought. A magistrate has been sent to look into the death of young Noah ("Trickle") du Pisani, the grandson of Abel Moolman, who has been found shot at the bottom of a newly dug
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