Jacket notes

HERMAN LATEGAN

You will be surprised, as I am, naively, at how different the Afrikaans reading market is from the English one. The latter is broad-minded. My memoir, Son of a Whore, originally appeared in Afrikaans as Hoerkind.

I was astonished by the conservative backlash from certain Afrikaans readers, even though the book was a runaway success. One would have thought that by now most Afrikaners would have emerged from the chains of banal parochialism and the suffocating clutches of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Evidently not. They took umbrage to the word hoer

(whore), not because they are woke, but because of the faux hypocrisy that still poisons the psyche of so many of my tribe. I was told by many readers that when they purchased the book, some cretin would peep over their shoulder and make moralistic judgments. There was also a sold-out play produced by theatre-maker Margit Meyer-Rödenbeck, which toured many venues. I saw with my own eyes how some people stormed out as soon as my character started swearing.

Not to mention the flak I received at certain Afrikaans book talks, with the smell of mothballs hanging in the air. I was casually profaning and had frank opinions of the Dutch Reformed Church. One haughty, moralistic grandee even opened a talk by warning me not to bash the church. Of course, the title is mentioned with wide eyes, as if I’ve just handed over Satan’s head to a nun.

Oh, the irony, because that is exactly what I was called as a child, a hoerkind (child of a whore), by none other than religious Afrikaners and, of course, that bastion of moral fortitude, the Dutch Reformed Church, who refused to baptise me. Thank heavens for small mercies.

Why did they call my mother a slut? I was born out of wedlock during the swinging ’60s. My mother had to endure these snarls, and so did I, into my late teens. In many ways, my book is a tribute to her solid bravery and her coterie of equally strong female friends who took a little ashamed boy by the hand and showed him that ons is nie almal so nie (we are not all like that).

The memoir takes you through the seedy boarding houses of the ’60s and ’70s in Kloof Street, Cape Town, where I was raised. You meet a mix of melancholic drag queens, broken single people whose faces were grief-stricken, and jolly hippies who danced to The Midnight Special by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Later, we lived in Sea Point, where my mother and her entourage exposed me to a cosmopolitan world far removed from the conservatism in most white suburbs. Let me not divulge too much. The columnist Chris Roper wrote that my memoir is also “the biography of a city”.

I translated the book into

English myself and felt the difference in my heart at once. With the Afrikaans, I had a dominee peeping over my shoulder — with the English, my hippie mother. ‘Son of a Whore’ by Herman Lategan is published by Penguin.