Let’s not get stuck in the past

I am not sure why I don’t identify as an Afrikaner, but if I am brutally honest with myself, I just don’t.

Look, I love biltong, melktert, koeksisters, braaibroodjies, brandy and speaking Afrikaans, but I do not feel like a boer.

I don’t wear khaki clothes; I don’t drive a Toyota bakkie and I don’t listen to Kurt Darren on a Saturday.

There are many traditions, folk stories and Afrikaner heroes I am happily unaware of and I don’t even visit the Voortrekker Monument on 16 December, not because I am usually working, but because I just don’t.

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I speak Afrikaans, I eat braaivleis and I watch rugby when the Bokke play, but I still don’t consider myself an Afrikaner, just Afrikaans.

Afrikaans is a lekker language and apparently voted one of the sexiest languages in the world, which wasn’t hard to believe if you considered how fun it was to curse in Afrikaans.

That was as far as it went for me. I don’t know Jan van Riebeeck apart from Andries Pretorius, or what the hoo-ha was around the Delray-sal-jy-die-boere-terug-lei movement, but count me out.

Yes, I speak Afrikaans, but does that make me an Afrikaner, being an Afrikaner or labelled or even associated with one sucked.

Besides that, I was clueless about the mission and vision of the Afrikaner, I just found it hard to relate to it, or channel my inner boere Auntie Stienie.

There are also certain ways of thinking of the Afrikaner that simply did not match my current situation, living in a so-called rainbow nation.

It was not that I was uninterested in learning about these forefathers of mine, I am not even aware from which boere stem I came, but somehow I found their legacy in the modern world had little to no benefit in my life.

My interests stretch as far as the stars, literally to yoga and spirituality, plants and fast cars.

In fact, if I lived during the Great Trek, I would be one of those girls who wore pants instead of a dress and got outcast for smoking around the corner and being burned like a witch in the Middle Ages.

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One of the reasons why I feel so disconnected from the Afrikaner movement is that it is very focused on the past, on the big move across the Drakensberg and a fight with the British, or was it the Zulus, and where were the Khoisan during all of this?

I also don’t want to join the EFF, because it is also a bit too stuck in the past, even though red might be a good colour for me.

While I think it was important to preserve history and keep to your roots, it is difficult to imagine myself wearing a Voortrekker dress, riding a horse with an old Zuid-Afrikaans flag down a dirt road in the Free State.

None of the symbolism served as inspiration, motivation or influence any part of life.

Don’t even get me started on the AWB uncles with the old flags and scary bedtime stories of the Night of the Long Knives fable being told from generation to generation.

I am not sure what Siener van Rensburg saw in his Voortrekker crystal ball, but I swear I should have been killed by now and that South Africa would resemble what was happening in Zimbabwe.

Van Rensburg’s predictions or fables were not only terrifying, but also did not add to the rainbow nation we were supposed to start building post-1994.

I am not saying let’s burn the old flag; let’s bury it with the hate in the past because I am sure not even Van Rensburg could predict half of what our current reality is, or what the future really held.

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