AFRIKANERS IN FLIGHT
Two women separated by time track their wayward men to Argentina. By
Maya Fowler could write a phonebook and it would be a pleasure to read. This incredible talent has been used to write Patagonia, a tale inspired by the 600 Afrikaner families who left South Africa for Argentina in the early 1900s.
Fowler had been captivated by this history since she was a child. “For most of my life I’ve been fascinated with the idea that there are Boers in Patagonia. I was a little girl when my father told me about a family friend who had been born in Argentina, though the family had returned to South Africa in 1938. I was astonished to hear that this Afrikaans-speaking woman had equal proficiency in Spanish, due to being born so very far away.”
This fascination stayed on to adulthood, when in 2014 “the teaser to Richard Finn Gregory’s documentary The Boers at the End of the World was released I thought I’d better make work of this immediately before someone else gets it in their head to write a novel on the same topic”.
Patagonia centres on two disgraced Afrikaner men. The first is Basjan, who sells out his family to the British in 1902, before slipping away to South America. The second is the great-grandson, Tertius, an aimless modern-day university professor who has a drunken one-night stand with a student. Career in tatters, he flees South Africa for Patagonia.
But it is the women connected to these broken men who are the spine of the tale. Salome chases after Basjan, to force him to right a wrong. Alta tracks down her husband, Tertius, to make him face what he has done. “These are strong women,” Fowler says. “They know that determination can take you a long way, and achieve tremendous things. Women are used to juggling a lot, and the barriers we have historically had to face, and continue to face, strengthens resolve.”
The novel is available in Afrikaans and Patagonie. “I’m equally confident in both languages, and have written original works in both,” Fowler says.
The process of creating the story in two languages was less of “translation” and more “a rewriting in another language”.
Henrietta Rose-Innes edited the English version and Fourie Botha the Afrikaans. Together, they created beautiful words to tell the story of the crumbling white-man identity.