Bitterkomix: Notes from the post-apartheid underground

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 103, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 719-754

  Barnard, Rita ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34147115263     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-103-4-719     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. All translations are my own. For the sake of brevity and flow I have provided the original Afrikaans (long citations in endnotes and shorter ones in parentheses) only in cases where the language of the original seems particularly interesting or where my translation is free. The commentators I refer to are, respectively, J. Heydenrich ("Vierde Aflewering van Bitterkomix het pas Verskyn," Beeld, January 16, 1994, 6), Mail and Guardian critic Shaun de Waal (Bitterkomix 4, 2)
2. Most recently Botes and Kannemeyer were invited to participate in Amsterdam's Tropenmuseum project Familie Verholen uit Zuid-Africa: Een Groepsportret (Family Histories from South Africa: A Group Portrait). About the vandalism: one Fletcher Reid, a member of the public, was disturbed by the pornographic nature of Kannemeyer's exhibition "Boerenoientjies hou van Pielsuig" ("Boer Lasses Like to Suck Dicks") in a gallery adjacent to the concourse of a Durban shopping mall. He took matters in his own hands by pouring paint over the artwork, and was duly charged with vandalism. In a strange "New South African" twist, the Islamic Propagation Center International agreed to pay in full for the damage (Fletcher Reid, "Actions of a 'Responsible Vandal,'" Sunday Tribune, November 26, 1995, 22)
3. The "loser" attitude in American fanzines, as Stephen Duncombe has argued, may be seen as a critique of the United State's ostensible meritocracy (Duncombe, Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture [New York: Verso, 1997], 17-21)
4. In the case of Bitterkomix, whose creators are successful and privileged individuals, the same attitude seems more of an elaborate intellectual pose, though it may also register a repressed irritation at affirmative action. On the question of imitation, consider, for instance, Matt Ross's "Space Love" (Bitterkomix 7, 15-17), which cribs its story from Douglas Conpland's Generation X without acknowledgment
5. The historiographic dimension of Bitterkomix is partly explained by the creative habits of several of the key contributors. Kannemeyer, who urges his students to keep visual journals, is a compulsive diarist and has kept a record of the titles of all the books he has read since childhood. In several of his strips, bookshelves displaying these titles are meticulously depicted: they provide a kind of alternative cultural canon on which he (or, more precisely, his grim autobiographical alter ego) draws to make his severe denunciations of Afrikaner culture. His one-time student, Ina van Rensburg, now a successful painter in the Netherlands, mines her old high school diaries for strangely affecting strips like "Tuesday 24 April 1984" or "Thursday 22 September 1988" (Bitterkomix 4,14
6. Best of Bitterkomix 2, 70), which record the minutiae of a girlhood in the last years of apartheid
7. Chris Nel, "Bitterkomix: Sowing for a Harvest of Death," Cape Times, June 14, 1996, 6
8. Jeremy Cronin, "Towards a National Culture: Oedipus, an Albino, and Others," Stet 3 (June 1985): 16-17
9. This is not to say that Heyns's reading is more optimistic than Cronin's: he argues that in recent South African literature the son's erotic relationship with the father (and vice versa) tends to be direct rather than mediated through a mimetic desire and competition for the mother. See Michiel Heyns, "Structures of Erotic Patriarchy," Ariel 27 (January 1996): 81-103
10. The phrase "children of Verwoerd" (kinders van Verwoerd), used in reference to my generation and the somewhat younger one of Botes and Kannemeyer, seems to have come into circulation in the late 1980s. It was the original title for the production Piekniek by Dingaan (Picnic at Dingane's), a cabaret that featured the music of several of the alternative musicians I discuss later in this essay. One of these, Ralph Rabie, alias Johannes Ker-korrel, captured the general feeling of this group in 1989: "We are furious, because our parents fucked everything up" (Pierre de Vos, "Nuwe Lied van Jong Suid-Afrika," Suid-Afrikaan, July 31, 1989, 24)
11. "Jeugweerbaarheid," Bitterkomix 4, 26
12. Ryk Hattingh, Bitterkomix 6, 40
13. In the American context, educational comics or "nonfiction cartooning" constituted but "a scattered archipelago" in the larger field of underground comics (Joshua Brown, "Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It," Radical History Review 46 [1990]: 426)
14. In South Africa, where, except for the melodramatic photo-novels (fotoromans, or, for some readers, "books") there was no comics industry to speak of, such politically inspired and pedagogically responsible "alternative" comics opened up the field of experimental graphic narration. See Silber's "Alternative, Yeah, So Where's da Porn," (Weekly Mail, June 19-25, 1987, 23) for a further sense of the comparative tameness of the South African comics scene in the 1980s
15. For a discussion of the influence of Rius, see Brown, "Every Picture Tells a Story," 424. Didactic history comics (such as Fighting Apartheid) were also produced for foreign audiences. There is now also a Mandela for Beginners
16. Luis Callinicos, "The People's Past: Towards Transforming the Present," in Belinda Bozzoli, ed., Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 49
17. Brown, "Every Picture Tells a Story," 422
18. Loren Kruger and Patricia Watson Shariff, "'Shoo-This Book Makes Me to Think!' Education, Entertainment, and 'Life-Skills' Comics in South Africa," Poetics Today 22 (Summer 2001): 474-513
19. This worry continues in the post-apartheid era: the strip Nonceba's Story (1996) went so far as to include instructions for deciphering the conventions of graphic fiction (Kruger and Shariff, "'Shoo,'" 491)
20. See Callinicos, "The People's Past," 49
21. Botes, "Bloedrivier," Bitterkomix 5, 18. Older accounts, the ones we used to learn in school, have Dingane shouting, "Bulalani amathagathi!" which means "Kill the sorcerers!" Botes's energetic caricature of Dingane is readily contrasted with the rather bland, dignified version of Dingane in Vusi Goes Back
22. I am thinking here of Ina van Zyl's reproduction of her own identity document and her grandmother's death certificate in the superbly drawn strip "Gertina Stephenete" (Bitter-komix 6, 34 and 36)
23. At the opening of the Bitterkomix retrospective at the French Cultural Center, the invited speaker, Johann Roussouw, addressed this very danger: "And lest we think the sin was only that of the fathers, let us not fail to note the number of bright young Afrikaner entrepreneurs who have discovered ... all that glitters. . . . Who would have thought that apartheid could be privatized?" (Bitterkomix 9, 1)
24. Mark James Estren, A History of Underground Comics (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974), 14-24
25. Some strips have a strong story line (e.g., Botes's crime saga "Fanie Swart"), while others operate more like visual poems (e.g., Joe Dog's collagelike "Alcohol"). In some strips the principle of illustration-a direct relationship between word and image-is essential. Botes's "Siembamba," for instance, defamiliarizes the disturbing lyrics of the old children's song of that name by representing them in brutally literal fashion. In other strips illustration is rejected in favor of a surreal mismatch between words and design, as in "The Klapmuts Police on the Offensive," where a banal TV crime report is accompanied by an array of disconnected images, ranging from a sinister Romanesque square in the style of de Chirico, to Superman in flight, to a solitary condom. The latter functions, no doubt, as a visual emblem for what Botes and Kannemeyer call "effie-logic," that is, a cover-up (Michael Morris, "Stripteasers," Sunday Independent, July 16, 1995, 6)
26. Nabokov's is a powerful argument, but what distinguishes pornography from other mass-mediated forms and associates it with the avant-garde is, of course, its capacity to shock and offend. It is for this reason that Kannemeyer has described pornography as "an excellent vehicle to bring some powerful ideas across," especially in the South African context, where conventional and compulsorily heterosexual attitudes still hold considerable sway (Morris, "Stripteasers," 6)
27. Hans Pienaar, "Afrikaner Musings on a Hand-Me-Down Empire," Star, April 20, 1995, 14. Breyten Breytenbach is the most famous polemicist for the argument against Afrikaans's purported purity. He sees the attempt of apartheid-era textbooks to describe Afrikaans as "the youngest Germanic language" as a complete betrayal of the historical origins of the language, which was born, as he eloquently puts it, from "the collision and coupling of culture-from domination and humiliation, ignorance and poetry, from the bible and the mosque and the bar and the shack and the veld, from death and adaptation" ("uit die botsing end die paring van kulture-van onkunde en van poësie, uit die bybel en die moskee end die kroeg en die krot end die veld, uit sterwe en aanpassing") (Breyten Breytenbach, "Andersheid en Andersmaak: Oftewel die Afrikaner as Afrikaan [Berig Gerig aan Frederick van Zyl Slabbert]," Fragmente 4 [1999]: 27-28)
28. A. N. Pelzer, Verwoerd Speaks: Speeches 1948-1966 (Johannesburg: ARB, 1966), 723
29. On the apartheid government and television, see Rob Nixon's chapter, "The Devil in the Black Box: The Idea of America and the Outlawing of TV," in his Harlem, Homelands, Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994), 43-77
30. Ivor Powell, "Letoit, the Unblushing Afrikaffer Goblin," Weekly Mail, February 2, 1989, 23
31. For an analysis of this music as "semioclastic" practice in the context of the state of emergency, see Rita Barnard, "The Final Safari: On Nature, Myth, and the Literature of the Emergency," in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 123-40; especially 131-33
32. One senses considerable idealism in some of the pronouncements of the "alternative" Afrikaans musicians of the late 1980s: Ralph Rabie, alias Johannes Kerkorrel, told reporters in 1989, "Our only function is to work towards creating a South African culture that is open and free for everybody. . . . So obviously I think young Afrikaans people have a role to play in helping to create that culture, and they must work with black people" (Deon du Plessis, Andrea Weiss, and Jeremy Dowson, "Kerkorrel and Kie," Star, May 27, 1989, 1)
33. "You always have to push the audience a little," he notes elsewhere, "You need to get them to the point where they can see the ridiculousness of the paranoia about the ANC" (De Vos, "Nuwe Lied van Jong," 24)
34. See, for instance, the cover of the limited circulation collection Lag-lag (also from Bitter-komix Pulp), which features on its cover the effects of "Dr. Koos de Beer's Affirmative Action Program," as well as Wilhelm Kruger's strip "Going All the Way: The Treatment That Will Change the Way You Live" in l-Komix 13 (Durban: Orange Juice Productions and Bitterkomix Pulp, [n.d.])
35. Bitterkomix 7, 26. The original reads, "Teen skemeraand het ek deur Thomas Pakenham se The Boer War geblaai. Ek het myself herken in 'n foto van 'n boeresoldaat wat, geblinddoek, aan die hande gelei word, en beeide opgeroep van snikkende boeremense wat voor 'n waarheids-kommissie oor konsentrasiekampe getuig."
36. Letter, Bitterkomix 7, 38
37. Powell, "Letoit," 23
38. Bitterkomix 5, 39
39. Bitterkomix 7, 38
40. Bitterkomix 12, 59
41. Ashraf Jamal, Bitterkomix 9, 43
42. Liese van der Watt, for one, noted in a 1997 conference paper that such work may provide "a cool and trendy license to dismiss and to disregard many of the corrected racial and gender relations that are entrenched in our constitution (and almost nowhere else as the comic do point out)" (cited in Bitterkomix 9, 43)
43. A. O. Rheeder, in a recent MA thesis from Stellenbosch, concludes as follows: "Bit. terkomix unquestionably includes literary qualities, requiring academic attention and brings, in my view, an renewal in Afrikaans literature" ("Bittcrkomix: Teks, Konteks, Interteks, en die literêre strokies van Conrad Botes en Anton Kannemeyer" (University of Stellenbosch, March 2000, 184). While Rheeder is not wrong, exactly, and while his thesis is not uninteresting, it nevertheless seems to me that academic praise of avant-gardist works inevitably disarms their most explosive messages
44. Krog's Country of My Skull, which is preoccupied with the forms in which the stories of long-denied suffering may be articulated, is attentive to the possibilities of the comic strip. See her meditations on a friend's idea that the testimony of Nomonde Calata, the widow of one of the Cradock Four, could be recast as a comic strip entitled "The Contestation of Spaces" (Country of My Skull; Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgivenncss in the New South Africa [New York: Random House, 1989], 51-54)
45. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1
46. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 276
47. Koos Kombuis, "Smoke and Ochre" ("Rook en Oker"), Bitterkomix 7, 18
48. Editorial, Bitlerkomix 12, 2