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The dominant social and religious landscape of Afrikaner South Africa in the 1970s was moral Calvinist conformity and a unified volk identity, despite pernicious overseas influences (like pop music) and material temptations.⁵⁷¹ Christian nationalism “embraced and legitimated” Afrikaner nationalism, rendering apartheid ”more comfortable for Whites by the spiritual solace of the evangelical tradition … A broad theology of culture, stitched together from neo-Calvinist rigour and evangelical piety, ensured the dominance of Afrikanerdom and apartheid”.⁵⁷² Despite changes in Afrikaner identity, the Afrikaans-language films of the 1970s continue to assert traditional ideals of behaviour, morality and culture for their increasingly youthful audiences. Even the most self-aware and risqué beach-romp (such as Die Spaanse Vlieg) ultimately stresses the resilience of the volk, or warns of its fall in the face of “modern”

permissiveness and cultural dilution, a result of overseas influence and increased prosperity.⁵⁷³

The 1960s and 70s were marked by middle-class Afrikaner social climbing, materialism and rampant consumerism.⁵⁷⁴ The representation of leisure and material comfort – status signifiers of the prosperous, modern lifestyle – is an important aspect of the 1970s cultural landscape.⁵⁷⁵ However, in

571. Calvinist doctrine took the form of “synodal pronouncements” concerning gambling and sport on Sundays. Adam and Giliomee, The Rise and Crisis, 23.

572. E. M. Klaaren, “Creation and Apartheid: SA Theology since 1948”, in Christianity in South Africa: a Political, Social, and Cultural History, eds R. Elphick & R. Davenport (California: University of California Press, 1997), 373-4.

573 . “[W]ealth, whether in abundance on a large scale, or a few small random windfalls, can be a serious threat to the individual, the family and the nation.” “Word ons Afrikaners te Ryk?”, Die Huisgenoot, 12 Julie 1968, translated and cited in Grundlingh, “Are we Afrikaners”, 152.

574. Leading to class snobbery: “The city has seriously deepened the chasm between prosperous Afrikaners and their less well-off countrymen … The city has in fact created class divisions among us and even a considerable degree of snobbishness.” J.S. Gericke, Moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church, translated and quoted in ibid, 148-9; see also Die Huisgenoot, 24 November, 1964, “Die snobs en standsoekers in ons midde”[The snobs and social climbers in our midst].

575. Grundlingh comments on the controlled nature of Afrikaner leisure, connected to Afrikaner cultural and moral nationalism on display at coastal ”vakansieoorde”[holiday resports]. Even

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147 more serious films, conspicuous consumerism is never applauded. Instead, representations of humility, community spirit and moral worth conform to the Christian National ideology underlying much of Afrikaner society, enforced in the media by the Censor Board and by educational, religious and community leaders.⁵⁷⁶ These films offer evidence of the struggle between “abstemious” volk values – linked with working-class, “old” Afrikaners and political “verkramptes”

– and the volksvreemd displays of consumerism of the nouveau riche: the

“verligte” new Afrikaner business elite and professional classes.^577,578 (Significantly, verligte elements within the NP were largely in the Cape.⁵⁷⁹ Although the political power struggle of the 1970s is not alluded to in these films, the wealth of the region on film associates “enlightened” Afrikaner business with these idealised southern landscapes. ⁵⁸⁰)

For example, in A New Life, Victor Collins rebels against his materialistic, pretentious upper-middle-class urban lifestyle (a life of “English” or foreign high culture). Near the end of the film, Collins races to the Drakensberg to a new life – drawn by simplicity, pastoral values and the promise of family.

holiday activities were volks-friendly and “curative”. “Holidays at Hartenbos”; “Are we Afrikaners”, 152.

576. “Ostentatious display of wealth” and “elaborate status symbols” were not encouraged and seen as “divisive”. Adam and Giliomee, The Rise and Crisis, 72.

577. Post-Vorster hardline verkramptes (conservatives) accused (more liberal) verligtes of “spiritual rot”, “moral nihilism” and the “law of the jungle”. Beeld 27 November 1978, cited in ibid, 74;

Grundlingh, “Are we Afrikaners”, 15. Verkramptes “appealed to past traditions” of the volk, while verligtes were pragmatic reformers, aware of the need to transform nationalist ideology according to changing “social composition and material needs”. Verkramptes safeguarded the interests of the (poorer) volk against the “cosmopolitanism of the cities” and the “corrupting power of money”, while verligtes represented Afrikaner capitalists who looked to consolidate business interests (cooperating, controversially, with “foreign”, English-speaking business). Verkramptes, representing the church, denounced verligtes for their “rejection of the Christian ethic, and of the morals and traditions which, through the centuries, have been built on this ethic”. Dr Andries Treurnicht, cited in O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 156. See Ibid, 155-156.

578. In the 1940s, the NP had had an anticapitalist and largely Boer worker/farmer support base, but by the end of the prosperous 1960s the “new Afrikaner bourgeoisie” was asserting itself rapidly, even in the Broederbond. O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 144-8; 160; 166; Adam and Giliomee, The Rise and Crisis, 187; Giliomee, “Ethnic Business and Economic Empowerment”, 786.

579. Different sectors of the press were also co-opted by each of the opposing party constituencies, especially during the 1980s. Nasionale Pers or Naspers (National Press) was based in the verligte or tolerant Cape. Muller, 1987, cited in K. Tomaselli and R. Tomaselli, “Exogenous and Endogenous Democracy: South African Politics and Media”, The International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (2008), 171.

580. Enlightened Afrikaner business leaders saw that apartheid negatively affected labour, growth and investment. By the mid-1960s, the formerly close alliance between the NP and Afrikaans business had begun dissolving, part of a broader process set in motion by the prosperity of the decade, the rise of consumer values in all sections of Afrikaner society, the influence of Afrikaner businessmen, and collaboration with foreign, English-speaking and neighbouring African companies. A. Grundlingh (2008), cited in Giliomee, “Ethnic Business and Economic Empowerment”, 785-786.

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Boemerang’s sense of home and family is less idyllic, tempered with a contemporary late-‘70s tone and a concern for urban reality: Ben’s family live in a poky flat and both fathers are confronted with disrespectful hippies and disobedient daughters. But ultimately, the stresses of unemployment, espionage and kidnapping are survived when the patriarch re-assumes control of his wayward family.

These films also address the complex class and rural/urban identity of Afrikaans audiences. By 1970, 86.7% of white South Africans were urbanised – a large number of them Afrikaners.⁵⁸¹ However, small-town or rural ways of life would not yet have passed from popular memory. Many wealthier Afrikaners were still farmers – a common theme in Cape movies of the 1970s – but the impoverished “bywoner” (sharecropper) usually appears in historical films.⁵⁸²

Comedies like Die Spaanse Vlieg straddle these contradictory positions, proposing moral guidelines for the volk while reflecting ambivalence toward wealth and “modern” values. They suggest a compromise, emphasising that Christian National morality can exist alongside material comfort – a visual confirmation of the message of the post-Great Depression Afrikaner ”economic movement”, which urged Afrikaners to mobilise economically.⁵⁸³ The Afrikaner, while maintaining the old spirit of church and volk, was now also encouraged to do well, to “spend for success” and compete with English-speaking South Africa and internationally.⁵⁸⁴ Representations of prosperous Afrikaners residing or holidaying in a contemporary, picturesque Cape Province promote the image of a contemporary, financially successful volk – Afrikaner culture in an ”attractive wrapping”.⁵⁸⁵

By the 1970s, relatively enlightened values were becoming more apparent in the South African media. There was much debate around the introduction of TV and an end to isolation.⁵⁸⁶ An opinion poll conducted in 1969 indicates that

581. Compared with 65.2% in 1936. From SA Statistics 1974, cited in D. du Toit, Capital and Labour in South Africa: Class Struggle in the 1970s. (London, Boston: Kegan Paul, 1981), 22.

582. With the exception of some television programmes and Rautenbach’s Pappa Lap.

583. Giliomee, “Ethnic Business and Economic Empowerment”, 771.

584. P. Rouillard (1997) quoted in Grundlingh, “Are we Afrikaners”, 146.

585. Adam and Giliomee, The Rise and Crisis, 129.

586. TV was only introduced to SA in 1976: it was regarded by conservatives as a danger and a moral threat to the volk and its youth. From its introduction until 1983, one third of the programmes were of Western origin (54% from the USA, 30% from the UK). Light entertainment

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149 Afrikaans-speakers were in favour of TV, although less so than the English speakers (59% to 75%).⁵⁸⁷ The advent of TV in 1976 was in part due to the ascent of verligte elements in the NP and the “banishing” of ultra-conservative Hertzog from Vorster’s cabinet in 1969. More significant, however, were advances in satellite technology; state leaders (and the Broederbond) hopped on the TV bandwagon in an attempt to control the medium, and to “protect” the South African way of life in the face of satellite transmissions of overseas programmes.⁵⁸⁸ Nonetheless, the introduction of TV and increased exposure to imported films influenced the liberalisation of Afrikaner and youth society reflected in post-1976 Cape films.

Local films continued to emulate overseas productions, which, with the emergence of the “Hollywood new wave”, increasingly featured leftwing politics, sex, violence, controversial themes and realism.⁵⁸⁹ (Many of these films were banned or cut in South Africa.)⁵⁹⁰ By 1978, Afrikaans filmmakers like Dirk de Villiers were experimenting with edgier fare (e.g. his 1976 film about stripper Glenda Kemp.)⁵⁹¹ The relatively “enlightened” censorship atmosphere of the late 1970s is evident in Die Spaanse Vlieg in the hiring of Pieter-Dirk Uys as screenwriter, the references to “moffies” and a shot of a naked man’s rear.⁵⁹² However, Tomaselli reminds us that this ”enlightenment” only applied to depictions of swearing and nudity and not to ideological constraints on films – despite the influence of the relatively liberal University of South Africa (Unisa)

programmes made up 70 % of all shows and there were no educational programmes during this period. T. Varis, “The International Flow of Television Programmes”, in Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Volume 5, ed. T. Miller (London: Routledge, 2003), 79.

587. Cape Times, 17 March, 1969, quoted in B. Cros, “Why South Africa’s Television is only Twenty Years Old: Debating Civilisation, 1958-1969”, Observatoire Réunionnais des Arts, des Civilisations et des Littératures dans leur Environnement, accessed 6 Oct 2012:

http://laboratoires.univ-reunion.fr/oracle/documents/217.html.

588. R. Krabill, Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 49-50.

589. The 1970s saw a great number of increasingly artistic and provocative features that were also commercial successes. American auteur directors like Coppola, Scorsese, Allen, Polanski, Kubrick, Altman and Lumet appeared alongside controversial British productions by Monty Python and Roeg.

590. The Life of Brian, A Clockwork Orange and Lady Chatterley's Lover were just three of the many films banned in SA.

591. After it was unbanned and released, the film failed at the local box office: once all scenes of nudity were excised, it couldn’t compete with hard-core porn (especially overseas).

“Glenda/Snake Dancer - South African OST”, Paris DJs (‘Djouls’), accessed 6 Oct 2012:

http://www.parisdjs.com/ index.php/ post/Glenda-Snake-Dancer-South-African-OST 592. Moffies are homosexual men (pejorative).

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law professor Kobus van Rooyen, who was Deputy Chair of the Publications Appeal Board in the 1970s.⁵⁹³

The urban confidence of the 1970s allowed for satire and inoffensive (and unsubversive) fun-poking at rural small-mindedness, class and other Afrikaans stereotypes (religious or moral fanaticism, petty bureaucrats, girls in bikinis, plaasjapies and “Valies”) as well as numerous Others – the symbolic uitlanders (Americans, reporters, Africans, psychologists, hippies).⁵⁹⁴ Die Spaanse Vlieg, to an unusual degree, exposes hypocrisy in the older generation (and puritanical Afrikaner ideology) and satirises their salacious enjoyment of various Christian National no-no’s.⁵⁹⁵ The story concerns the verkrampte community elders of Hermanus and a series of misunderstandings between them and their children.⁵⁹⁶ The film asks Afrikaners to poke fun at their sacred cows – but it does so with affection and even appreciation. Crucially, it reserves its satire for sex and never political ideology. The film begins with an overblown monologue voicing the dangers facing concerned parents:

All of the great civilisations of the past crumbled to dust, not because of pressures from outside, no, but as the direct result of the implosion of their moral codes and basic decency.

It is with great pride that we assure the world that such things cannot and will not happen here in Hermanus.⁵⁹⁷

The camera zooms in on a meeting of the Hermanus Moral Action Committee.

The conservatively dressed audience nods in agreement. Emma Van Rooyen, the speaker’s wife, continues in the same vein, saying that the responsibility of

593. Such “enlightenment” was especially evident in the 1980s. Tomaselli, The Cinema of Apartheid, 202. In 1980, Van Rooyen became the Chairman of the Publications Appeal Board (until 1990) and a substantial lightening of apartheid censorship of books, films and public entertainment occurred. He championed the screening of Cry Freedom. However: “Because recent Directorate of Publications judgments place less emphasis on nudity, sex or the use of four letter words, this does not necessarily indicate a more 'enlightened' approach to censorship … This system is able to increasingly take cognizance of liberalized sexual mores … The result is an apparent 'enlightenment' of the Directorate of Publications which is measured by the number of swear words in Apocalypse Now (l980) or the square centre meterage of Bo Derek’s breasts seen in the film 10 …” Tomaselli, “Ideology and Censorship”, 12.

594. Satire was not foreign to Afrikaans film: as early as the 1950s, Jamie Uys’ films include many jokes at the expense of English and Afrikaner stereotypes.

595. The screenwriter is Pieter-Dirk Uys, which probably accounts for the numerous “double entendres” in the dialogue. Wilson, “Slight Tilt”.

596. Verkramp in the sense of “hostility to all that is new; an attachment to the existing; a resistance to renewal and a passion to continue with and extend patterns belonging to the past; negation, condemnation and suppression … verkamp is a traditionalist attitude which elevates tradition

…to principle and norm.” W.J. De Klerk, cited in O’Meara, Forty Lost Years, 155, footnote.

597. My translation from the Afrikaans.

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151 the committee is “to fight the volksvreemd evils of pornography, unseemly things in films, books, magazines and newspapers”.⁵⁹⁸

While the film is a comedy, it also portrays the material and social reality of twenty-something Afrikaners in the late 1970s who epitomise what Grundlingh terms the “individualised materialism” of the new Afrikaner.⁵⁹⁹ These are clearly “with it” young people who swear, smoke and drink, wear skimpy clothes and skinny-dip in the nude; they are able to look beyond the increasingly “brittle” boundaries of their parent’s lives.⁶⁰⁰ But material reality aside, the film’s main concern is with traditional Afrikaner morality, and its humour is focussed on the Calvinist obsession with sex and unwed mothers.⁶⁰¹ Young blonde boeredogter Paula is having an “affair” with older Lothario, lawyer Pierre Durandt.⁶⁰² Paula’s parents, Emma and Lourens Van Rooyen, head the “Moral Action Committee”, given to spying on under-dressed beachgoers and kissing couples (“sex maniacs”) – a reference to the “moral policing” and protection of the youth exemplified by the Censor Board.⁶⁰³

These are also hypocritical people: Emma Van Rooyen accepts Pierre as her son-in-law only after she finds out he is the son of a rugby hero (a sly nod to reverent rugby-jock films); Lourens and two of his friends believe that they have fathered an illegitimate child; dancing is forbidden in the town – even though the adult couples met at dances when young. Thus the film gently points to hypocrisy and overreaction in “paranoïes verkrampt” Afrikaans parents

598. My translation from the Afrikaans.

599. Grundlingh states that consumer practices and “processes of detraditionalisation” helped Afrikaners “reimagine” their identities. Changed material circumstances (like increased wealth) can be linked to declining ethnic feeling, especially among the youth. Grundlingh, “Are We Afrikaners”, 158; D Bell and J Hollows cited in ibid.

600. Reflecting enlightened, modern and avant-garde elements that were also an influential feature of Afrikaner society in the 60s and 70s – like the “Sestiger” writers, poets and artists, and an Afrikaner youth responding to world-wide movements in youth culture (formed around popular music), as well as the numerous disreputable youth (like “ducktails”) inhabiting the big cities after the 1950s. See Ibid, 153-157.

601. No doubt a reference to the popular “unwed-mother” film Debbie (1965), which defined the sentimental Afrikaans films of the 1960s. Debbie is a naïve, blonde, boeredogter student. Her boyfriend leaves to study overseas while she is forced to give up the child for adoption.

[Emphasis mine.]

602. See Tomaselli’s notion in Encountering Modernity of the ”blonde boeredogter” of the Afrikaans “Eden” film.

603. Ben de Kock describes how the “dear innocent” film Debbie was given an age restriction of 21 by the Minister concerned to “protect the youth”. This decision was overturned a week later to no age restriction at all. “Wat is die Stand”.

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and communities, while using these same qualities as an opportunity for slapstick, innuendo and comic misunderstanding. ⁶⁰⁴

The moral state of the youth was very much a preoccupation of Christian Nationalists from the 1960s on, especially as degenerate, permissive international culture began to infiltrate and influence the domestic media.⁶⁰⁵ Grundlingh writes of how clothes and music were bones of contention in the 60s and 70s; the SABC did not play rock music. However, Grundlingh points out that Calvinist dismay and conservative broadcasting policy had little impact on the large numbers of Afrikaans youth who wore miniskirts and bikinis or listened to LM radio on shortwave.⁶⁰⁶ It is also important to note that, by the late 1970s, film audiences would have consisted of increasingly large numbers of younger, more sophisticated Afrikaners.⁶⁰⁷

This real-life ambivalence toward parental and church opinion is reflected in Boemerang and Die Spaanse Vlieg. The gulf between youth and age is a major theme in both films, which are clearly designed to appeal to a young audience and have thwarted-young-love sub-plots. (The boys/men the girls are in love with are unsuitable and too “modern”.) Yet these films also satisfy their more conservative parents and their Christian moral sensitivities. In Boemerang’s case, this gulf is given voice in its songs (Sonja Groenewald sings to her teachers, “You are too old and too verkrampt!” and “The path you walk is not ours!” ⁶⁰⁸) As in many Afrikaans films of the era, local pop music is an important feature: theme songs were written for films in the hope they would become hits like “Hear my Song” did in 1967. All, however, are of the sentimental, folk-pop type; no foreign rock music (or foreign popular culture) is featured in any of these films.

604 “Paranoidly conservative”.

605 In the early 1970s, young people and those ”in the higher socio-economic bracket” notably started refusing to obey the Sabbath observance rules imposed by the NGK (including not reading, playing sport or doing gardening or housework). Welsh, The Rise and Fall, 192.

606. In all likelihood as many as English-speaking youths. Grundlingh, “Are We Afrikaners”, 158.

607. In the USA, with the advent of TV, the average age of audiences dropped as more and more newly affluent and sophisticated youth watched films, compared with decreased numbers of adults who now lived in the suburbs and watched TV. “The Film Industry and Audiences”

(Spectatorship and Audiences. Film reference), accessed 6 Oct. 2012:

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Spectatorship-and-Audiences-THE-FILM-INDUSTRY-AND-AUDIENCES.html

608. My translation from the Afrikaans.

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153 The films are also “liberated” with regard to fashion, expressing a muted view of budding adolescent sexuality. In Boemerang’s beach scene, almost the entire class of 16-year old schoolgirls is pictured wearing bikinis. The heroine

153 The films are also “liberated” with regard to fashion, expressing a muted view of budding adolescent sexuality. In Boemerang’s beach scene, almost the entire class of 16-year old schoolgirls is pictured wearing bikinis. The heroine