Play relevant in wake of Bird Island book
ACTOR Gideon Lombard was debating the relevance of the play
Die Reuk Van Appels, based on the late Mark Behr’s bestseller about the 11-year-old son of an apartheid army general who discovers his friend in bed with his father.
Then, this month the relevance returned with a bang as apartheid-era military heavy General Magnus Malan hit the headlines amid allegations of paedophilia in the book, The Lost Boys of Bird
Island, which details the abuse of young boys by high-ranking National Party leaders.
“I remember when we started the play one-and-a-half years ago, it was not the focus then.
“It’s a sad irony that in some or other way, it is still necessary to do the play,” said 32-year-old Namibian-born Lombard.
He will perform his one-person show at the Hilton College Arts Festival.
“This story in itself can act as a cautionary tale for us,” said Lombard.
“There’s a misconception in Afrikaner culture to not talk about many things, especially with regards to the border war.”
It was not necessarily only sexual experiences, but also many others that fell under the weight of indoctrination that comes with this ideology and the damaging effects of not questioning it.
“What are the by-products of manipulation of power and megalomania?” asked Lombard.
He described the sudden link to the Bird Island allegations as “scary and unsettling”.
Although Behr, who spent part of his childhood in Durban and was educated at the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir School and at Hoërskool Port Natal, translated the book into an English edition
The Smell of Apples, Lombard believes it more fitting for the play to be in Afrikaans.
“I think it works very well in Afrikaans. That was also the forced language of the time.
“Afrikaans is also a very beautiful language on stage and with poetry. It’s onomatopoeic.
The son of university professors, Lombard grew up in Europe and the US, as well as Namibia, where his father was an active member of the Namibia Peace Plan Study and Contact Group, NPP435, which lobbied for the implementation of UN Resolution 435.
The resolution proposed a ceasefire and UN-supervised elections.
“In my younger years, I always thought our phone number in Windhoek was NPP435!” said Lombard.