Simon Beyers, a melodrama set in the Cape winelands, is a highly fictionalised account of a historical incident in the late 17th century in which the first Governor of the Dutch settlement, Simon Van Der Stel, ”imported” a group of orphaned Dutch women (weesmeisies) of childbearing age.137 The “Weesmeisies van Rotterdam” was a romantic, filmable chapter in Cape Dutch folklore (especially as the Trek had been “done” in earlier films), one that would appeal to the masses of newly urbanised Afrikaans-speaking cinemagoers. The weesmeisie progenitors have been regarded by some genealogists as significant to the ancestry of the early Cape.138 However, the historical record casts doubt on this, suggesting that mythologising processes informed the making of this film and the invention of the orphan “Maria Overbeek”.139 (Simon Beyers and others portrayed are also largely invented characters.)
134. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice.
135. According to Rompel, the ”ideal Volks-film [People’s-film] should push the idea of an agricultural socialism, of an uncontaminated and pure Afrikaner society”. Quoted in Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid, 112.
136. Tomaselli, Encountering Modernity, 143.
137. See appendix 1 for synopsis and production details.
138. “Weesmeisies”, accessed on 25 Sept. 2012:
http://www.eggsa.org/articles/Weesmeisies.htm. See also H. T. Colenbrander, De Afkomst der Boeren (Cape Town, C. Struik, 2nd edition, 1964), for a study of the origins of European settlers of the Cape up to 1885. (There is a chronological table of “Stamvaders en Stammoeders van Kaapsche Geslachten” from page 20 - 105.)
139. Letter from the Directors of the Chamber of Rotterdam to Commander Simon Van Der Stel, Commander at the Cape of Good Hope, and his Council of the Dutch East India Company, 23 December 1687. Cape Archives: C.416, 1030 - 1032. Only three of the true weesmeisies were the stammoeders (founding mothers) of future Afrikaner families. According to genealogist C.G.de Wet, it was practically impossible to find enough “farm” girls in Holland to fulfill Van Der Stel's request (popular legend has the number at 50). Only eight (all from one Rotterdam orphanage) departed in December 1687 on the ship the “Berg China”, arriving at the Cape on 4th August
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35 Simon Beyers invokes the winelands as a cultural and historical landscape: home to the founding Dutch fathers, and the origin of the Afrikaans culture and people. However, the film refers to “Afrikaners” and not the Dutch settlers, removing the European influence from this narrative of Afrikaner origins. The spatial narrative of the film accounts for Dutch (i.e. Afrikaner) claiming, naming and inscription of the local landscape, and its subject is literally the formation, or breeding, of the Afrikaner “race”. The ideological themes of the film are inextricably linked with the Afrikaner nationalism building up after 1938’s Voortrekker centennial celebrations. The fact that it was made in 1947, the year before the NP’s narrow victory over the UP at the polls, and in a period marked by an outpouring of Afrikaner nationalism, is of crucial importance to the film’s imaginary landscape of Afrikaner origins and place.
Simon Beyers was written by, directed by and starred Pierre de Wet, who exercised a high degree of control over the production of his films and this film in particular, developing it from a play previously produced by his company.140 It is one of the first “pure Afrikaans” productions and the first by the South African Film Company (or Suid-Afrikaanse Rolprentmaatskappy), which functioned as the Afrikaans unit of AFP (which handled technical aspects of this production).141 The SAFC, responsible for the marketing, distribution and production of a number of De Wet’s films, was described in the nationalist press of 1949 as being led by ”renowned” Afrikaners who exhibited “knowledge of
1688, and “resulted in no noticeable improvement in the shortage of marriageable women in the Cape settlement”. “Weesmeisies”, accessed 25 Sept. 2012:
http://www.eggsa.org/articles/Weesmeisies.htm#four.
140. Die Goeie Oue Tyd (described in the Cape Times as “set in the Romantic days of Simon van der Stel”), written for De Wet by “Sita”, was produced and performed around the country by the Pierre de Wet Toneelgeselskap in 1944. De Wet’s experiences in popular Afrikaans theatre in the 1940s - devoted to nationalist ideals and people’s theatre (volksteater), touring small towns across the platteland – accounts for the style and even ideology of his cinema. Numerous popular volk-choirs and -actors appeared in his musical films. “Die Goeie Oue Tyd”, accessed 25 Sept. 2012:
http://esat.sun.ac.za/ index.php/Die_Goeie_Oue_Tyd; “Pierre De Wet Toneelgeselskap”, accessed 25 Sept. 2012: http:// esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Pierre_De_Wet_Toneelgeselskap. See also Le Roux and Fourie, Filmverlede, 38; “Costume Play in Afrikaans”, Cape Times, 25 August, 1944.
141. At the time of the Cilliers (1943) and Smith reports (1944) (named for the chairmen of committees reporting to the government about “stimulating the growth” of a “national” film industry), Schlesinger’s “SA-owned, English language” AFP remained free of “state interference”, at least until the NP came into power in 1948. Tomaselli also states that in the 1950s, Afrikaner capital and the government had little need for a “propagandistic cinema”, preferring other methods like radio, the press or “the host of other economic, repressive and political agencies now at its command”. Tomaselli, “Grierson in South Africa”.
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36
Afrikaans” and who knew “the needs of the Afrikaans public”.142 De Wet was one of these Afrikaners, in a position of social, cultural and political responsibility. His status in the late 1940s was bolstered by his reputation overseas: Simon Beyers was described as “the most important South African production to date” by Sight and Sound.143
Arising from a 1940s Afrikaner nationalist mythology, the film’s landscape is an amalgam of picturesque and pastoral pictorial conventions.
Together with the grandeur of the indigenous Cape Dutch architectural style, the natural and cultural landscape signifies the civilising influence of the
“gentry” burghers – proto-Boers – on the Cape and its barbarian peoples, while the dialogue emphasises their epic struggle to transform the wilderness into an Edenic garden. An important difference between this film and earlier historical epics is that, despite its proselytising tone, Simon Beyers is a character-driven, interior-set melodrama rather than an obvious work of propaganda following a settler or “frontier” narrative. In the epic films, the region is the starting point for a narrative of nation that traverses the wilderness-veld and ends on the Vaal platteland. Instead, here, the Cape is represented through static, even painterly images of settled homes and farmsteads: an immersive, highly cultivated
“garden” landscape. The significance of this film resides in its invention of a heritage and an identity for the volk, picturesquely represented by the domestic and settled aspects of the Cape Dutch landscape, particularly the homestead.144 Simon Beyers is portrayed as “indigenous” rather than European, unlike the other characters in the film; a simple, prototypical farmer, an insider in the landscape he has cultivated. Contrasting strongly with the “Cape Gentry at play” in Die Bou van ‘n Nasie, this pioneer Cape forefather is linked to the prototypical Afrikaner patriarch envisaged in the 1940s: hardworking, God-fearing custodian of the volk and their values and rights.
The film’s representation of an established, gentry-owned farm landscape is complex in that it suits both Union and Afrikaner-nationalist aesthetic claims to the landscape – perhaps because the film was made in 1947,
142. “Rolprente in Afrikaans”, Die Brandwag, 8 August, 1949, quoted in Van Staden &
Sevenhuysen, Drie Vroeë Afrikaanse Rolprente, 175.
143. Sight and Sound, quoted in Le Roux and Fourie, Filmverlede, 37.
144. The settled, permanent nature of the Dutch presence is alluded to when Simon tells Maria that, unlike the Huguenots, the Dutch are “established” and “lodged in” the Cape.
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37 at a turning point of government and ideology. The Union’s “South Africanist”
ideal is evoked by images of the colonial Cape and its romantic buildings. The Cape Dutch architecture combines the best of settler and (white) indigenous culture, with Europe’s civilising influence applied in African conditions: a refined aesthetic that symbolised Union and lingered well into the late 1940s.145
In addition to laying historical claim to the landscape and the nation, Afrikaner nationalism’s Cape foundational narrative emphasises the noble, European antecedents of Afrikanerdom, underpinning its claim to high culture and equality with English settler history.146After 1948, the “cult of the Cape Dutch”, emphasising a shared settler past in the “cradle of nation”, was no longer part of the national programme. However, Matieland and later romances continue to represent the winelands as a territorial heartland and a foundational volk landscape. These later representations emphasise Afrikaner cultural history, specifically a wealthy, cultured, “aristocratic” breed of Afrikaner landowner or farmer – very different to the unsophisticated, platteland-dwelling contemporary Boer facing urbanisation and land-loss. For modern Afrikaners, a film like Simon Beyers offered a nostalgic fantasy as well as a cultural ideal.
Despite being set in the Cape, Simon Beyers offers viewers very little sense of indigenous, Cape landscape identity. There are few lingering natural views or panoramic outdoors shots. Even the farmhouse is depicted in an abstract fashion, unlike the lovingly shot, historic architecture seen in other films set in the region. The film's first image is of an elevated frontal view of the Welgelegen house: a “stock view”, repeated throughout the film and dominating the outdoors shots. The first half of the film is shot almost entirely in the simple yet well-appointed voorkamer (front room), with only occasional views of the front of the house and, once, the yard. There is only one true landscape in the first half of the film, a conventional picturesque nature-view
145. Cape Dutch architecture “was celebrated as the epitome of lasting settlement rather than as a token occupation of the land”. P. Merrington, “Pageantry and Primitivism: Dorothea Fairbridge and the Aesthetics of Union”, Journal of Southern African Studies 21 no. 4 (1995), 643-56: 647 [Emphasis mine.] The “cult of the Cape Dutch” and the “cradle of shared nationhood” were part of an “aesthetics of Union” employed in an “imaginary narrative of descent”. Foster, Washed with Sun, 58-60.
146. According to Tomaselli, the Cilliers Report (1943) made it clear that a “high standard of culture” was essential to the national economy and cultural life; as such the cinema should be used as a “healing and formative influence”, managed and protected by the state. [Emphasis mine.] Tomaselli, “Grierson in South Africa”.
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with a side coulisse of foliage, flowering plants in the foreground, and mountains and sky receding into the background.147 This establishing shot merely confirms location and is barely a prospect view (common in the epic history films). The same shot is repeated in the second half to signify the landscape context of Welgelegen.
More indigenous exterior landscape sequences appear when Maria journeys into the interior, which is represented as untamed wilderness.
However, they are not shot in the epic or panoramic manner of the two earlier trek films. Maria’s journey is pictured against a repetitive, static backdrop of anonymous veldscape, with no identifying features. The danger of the veld is inferred, rather than represented, by spoken references to Khoisan or
“Hottentot” attacks, making them seem a distant concern. Thus, the domesticated, established nature of this landscape is emphasised over the frontier images in De Voortrekkers and Die Bou van ‘n Nasie, which emphasise Afrikaners as pioneer farmers and trekkers grappling with wilderness. The lack of identifiable scenery suggests the filmmakers attempted to create an impression of wilderness, rather than filming on location. Indeed, in the second half of the film, the effect of panoramic landscape appears to have been created by montaging together different shots. Like Hans die Skipper, large segments of the film were shot in AFP’s Killarney studios in Johannesburg. This, together with the theatre background of De Wet and many of the other actors, and the proselytising tone of the many monologues, lends the film a theatrical quality.
The “message” of these films is communicated to the viewer on multiple levels. Along with symbolic landscape, dialogue – often clunky and didactic – is an important source of information and ideological inference. In an early sequence, the content of the weesmeisies story is summarised for the viewer. The youth and beauty (implying health and fertility) of the orphan girls is emphasised, as is their “calling” to populate the Cape. Another dialogue-driven scene establishes Simon Beyers' character and outlines expectations for the volk.
In what is clearly a nationalist propaganda monologue, Beyers, an unsmiling patriarch, is described in heroic, mythic terms as “the master of the house, the farm, the slaves and everything”. Associated with his farm and the
147. A coulisse is a side-screen of scenery, common in theatre, which frames the centre of the stage.
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39 transformation of the wild landscape, he is “like the land that he has made”.
The archetypal “volksmoeder” is also alluded to: Maria is instructed that she must provide children for her husband, to be one of the “mothers of the people”. The resulting volk will be a “great people” who will inhabit this wonderful land and serve the future nation. At one point, Beyers delivers a
“blood and soil” monologue, describing how he has “sweated and toiled” on the land for the Company148. It is at this point that the first picturesque landscape image appears. The camera pans over the farm buildings, finally focussing on “1679” moulded on a gable: the viewer is reminded that this is
“history”.149 By foregrounding the architecture, the film creates a series of
“symbolic spaces” – signs of national heritage that “bear traces” of actual historical activity.150 This supposed historical authenticity was noted by the Afrikaans press: Die Brandwag described it as “a dramatic film taken from our history”.151
In another scene, the settlement's labour problems are described;
namely, the shortage of Khoisan slaves and the difficulty of hiring “Hotnot”
labourers. Beyers hints at the future discontent of the frontier burghers, anticipating the Great Trek. It is easy to read this scene in terms of the NP’s electioneering prior to the 1948, which played on the labour concerns and fears of a wide range of Afrikaners. Later, in a scene that demonstrates ideal Afrikaner behaviour – conflating patriotic nationhood and the patriarchal family unit while also confirming their historic nature – the entire Beyers family joyfully sings, “We drink to the future of our new land”, as well as the familiar folk song “Jan Pierewiet”.152 Outside, household slaves bob happily in time. The positive visualisation of master-slave relationships in the film naturalises the
148. Dutch East India Company
149. The dialogue constantly emphasises the historicity of the narrative, referencing “facts” such as the assimilation of the French Huguenots and the development of the Cape settlement.
150. Foster, Washed with Sun, 49.
151. Die Brandwag, 8th August 1949, quoted in Van Staden and Sevenhuysen, Drie Vroeë Afrikaanse Rolprente, 175. [Translated from Afrikaans.] Die Brandwag was a mouthpiece of Afrikaner nationalism.
152. [Translated from Afrikaans.] Van Staden and Sevenhuysen isolate the film’s conservative (bastardised) Calvinism, Afrikaner nationalism, paternalism and descriptions of rural life and farming as illustrating the social and moral ideological programme underpinning “socially responsible” Afrikaans film production in the late 1930s and 40s. According to the authors, films like Simon Beyers function as visual pictures, transmitting ideal values and behaviours to the Afrikaans public to help them deal with life crises. These films were thus not just entertainment but described an acceptable lifestyle to the volk. Ibid: 176-178.
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supposedly historically segregated landscape and conveys that the volk's control over black labour – its continued “baasskap” – is an inherited right.153
The large majority of scenes in the film, however, confirm the Afrikaner’s historical right to the land itself. The film visualises the Cape in terms of a “settler spatiality”, as a foundational white landscape, and utilises a blood-and-soil mythology to account for how a wild frontier becomes cultivated farmland and the birthright of the settlers’ Afrikaner descendants.154 About to go out on commando, Beyers launches into an “Afrikaner-as-pioneer”
monologue on the strange, untamed land that he has made his own.155 On this farm he wants to see his children grow: Welgelegen must remain in the Beyers' lineage.156 The settler mythology promoted in the first half of the film evolves into a more permanent sense of place, inheritance and continuity in the second;
the theme (as in De Voortrekkers) is resoundingly the Afrikaner family, envisaged by Afrikaner nationalism as the building block of the volk. We are told a people can prosper in a new land only with their wives and children beside them – confirmation of procreation and inheritance as the basis for cultural survival. In the final scenes, when Maria and Simon agree to raise the
“Afrikaanse” child as their own, it is clear that Welgelegen will continue and that, in symbolic terms, there is an indigenous heir to the Dutch legacy at the Cape. Like the epics discussed earlier, Simon Beyers thus proposes a landscape for the volk both imaginary (an ideal) and real (they did settle here), offering a historical narrative of the land and the heroic pioneer farmers who transformed and civilised it.
Judging by reports of the premiere at Pretoria’s Capitol Theatre on 11 August 1947, Afrikaans cinemagoers reacted positively to this melodrama.
Afrikaner nationalist mouthpiece Die Ruiter (also formed in 1947) described the audience as “sympathetic”, “enthusiastically” and “appreciatively” receiving the film’s various scenes, particularly its “picturesque” backgrounds. While
“taalgoggas” (language-bugs) took some offence at the English flavour of the
153. “Baasskap”refers to white “mastership”.
154. Foster, Washed with Sun, 51; 260.
155. This line in the film echoes a statement on the Vergelegen Estate promotional website, accessed 25 Sept. 2012: http://www.vergelegen.co.za/history.html: “The younger Van Der Stel ...
transformed the uncultivated land into a veritable paradise.”
156. My translation and a summary of the speech.
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41 invitations, any tension was alleviated by a volks-choir singing popular folksongs.157 Die Ruiter clearly viewed Simon Beyers as an important cinematic achievement for the nascent “true Afrikaans” film industry, up against a flood of poor Hollywood products.158 These sentiments were echoed by Die Transvaler, who described the film as an important achievement in the evolution of the indigenous industry, demonstrating “remarkable progress” compared with its predecessors.159