A Romance With the Anglo-Boer War

Transferential Zionism? — Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais:

A Romance of the Anglo-Boer War

Louise Bethlehem

English, The Program in Cultural Studies

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sarie, why are you looking at me that way?


(Michael Cawood Green 1997: 152)

1. Bed-fellows

This paper begins as a fantasy of watching and being watched, which is also to say

that it prolongs its opening moment through the digression of an epigraph, to which I revert

in a transgression or, etymologically, a walking across boundaries, that is at once intratextual,

intertextual and geographical. The epigraph to this paper is taken from one of the many

disparate but interwoven texts that comprise Michael Cawood Green’s 1997 verse novella,

Sinking, “Being a History, Romance, Allegory, Prophecy, Survey, Domestic Drama—and None

of the Above” (See Appendix 1). More specifically, it is drawn from a poem whose full title is

"An Old South African Love Song, Or, Sarie Marais Revisited" and whose temporality and

cadences are beleaguered, incipiently apocalyptic. " Now you know why it's so warm in bed

together / Look around you the house is burning down; / [. . .] Turn away from the mirror to

the window, / Oh, come on do you even have to ask? / You can't really believe we've got

problems of a serious nature. / After all, we're armed, white, and middle class" (ibid.: 151).

The note of foreboding struck in the poem, as well as its deliberately foregrounded

intertextuality are both well suited to my present concerns which will come to be focused on

a very different--which is also to say, differently apocalyptic --text: Manfred (Maier) Nathan’s

Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais 2

1938 Sarie Marais: A Romance of the Anglo-Boer War (1938). In the course of the discussion

to come, I will be claiming that Nathan's Sarie Marais provides the occasion for the

transferential projection of concerns that I will provisionally term "Zionist" onto a philo-

Afrikaner account of the South African War (1899 -1902).

My use of the notion of transfer is, at this stage, more a matter of what Donald

Harman Akenson might term "analogical history" (1992: 6) than it is a matter of

psychoanalytic—or other forms of—transference and substitution (although it will be all of

these things later). Given a highly developed analogical relation between Afrikaner and

Jewish nationalism, which might be stated baldly as "South Africa is to the Afrikaner as Israel

is to the Jew," my interest lies in certain nodes of entanglement that precipitate the crossing

of these promiscuously circulating national signifiers, so that Manfred Nathan's elaboration of

a canonical version of nationalist Afrikaner historiography in Sarie Marais, for instance, will

come to embed, within the seemingly closed circuit of the first set of analogical coordinates

("South Africa," "the Afrikaner"), concerns which properly belong to the second.

Historically speaking, certain such crossings are already implicit in the very

articulation of the analogical framework. Thus, Jan Smuts, a signatory of the 1917 Balfour

Declaration which would make the State of Israel possible, recalls his pro-Zionist advocacy as

a matter of vicarious identification motivated by Afrikaner history. For Smuts, in his self-

description as “a Boer with vivid memories of the recent past,” the "Jewish case" lodged its

appeal with “peculiar force” (see Gideon Shimoni 1980: 43). J.B.M. Hertzog, sometimes

opponent and sometimes ally of Smuts, held the Afrikaners of the National Party to be “like

the Jewish people,” a minority who “must do all in their power to keep alive their language

and racial characteristics. We have nothing but admiration for that race who have for two

thousand years struggled to keep alive their national culture and prevent themselves being

swamped by the nations among whom they dwell. We, like most Jews, are Zionists. Our

Homeland is South Africa; to us it is sacred soil” (in Shimoni, ibid: 49). Hertzog's statement,

issued on the eve of the 1929 general election that would give the National Party an overall

majority, subordinates its invocation of an ambiguous Zionism (whose object may, or may not

be, mandatory Palestine) to the need to reassure local Jewish voters—implicitly positioned as


a constituency within the patrimony, the promised land, of white South Africa. 1 In instances

like this, analogy recedes in favor of a variety of chiasmus (Greek kiasmos "crosswise

arrangement"), as it will continue to do in the text at hand. 2 My reading of Nathan's Sarie

Marais tropes chiastically on Hertzog's equation to the extent that it renders South Africa the

“sacred soil” of a Zionist’s text, that is to say, a text by a South African Zionist—the Jewish

lawyer and author, Manfred Nathan.

A prolific writer, Manfred Nathan's 35 published volumes range between

autobiography, biography (including an account of the life of Paul Kruger 1944 [1941]),

histories of Afrikaner nationalism (including chronicles of the Voortrekkers and the Huguenots

1937, 1938b, 1939), literary history (1925), a single work of historical fiction: Sarie Marais

(1938a), and numerous texts of legal theory. His contributions to public life were equally

expansive. Nathan was Vice-President of the South African Zionist Federation between 1904

and 1907, shortly after its inception in 1898; co -founder and honorary counsel of the South

African Jewish Board of Deputies in 1903, a founder and central executive member of the

South African Party in 1910; a founder of the University of the Witwatersrand (see Nathan

1944: 270); Johannesburg City Council member between 1916 -1919; Transvaal Provincial

Council member between 1917 -1920; Acting Supreme Court Judge of the Natal Provincial and

Eastern Districts local division (1928, 1930); President of the Special Income -Tax Appeal

Court (1931); and longtime personal friend of Jan Smuts (“Dr. Manfred Nathan,” South

African Jewish Board of Deputies Archive M103A. 8/5/1963, Mendel Kaplan and Marion

Robertson 1991). The man was, it would seem, an exemplary South African Jew—at least in

one reading of this category. According to the official reckoning of the Jewish community, his

biography constituted “one more happy example of the way in which it is possible to combine

devotion to Judaism and Jewish causes with service to the country at large" ("Dr. Manfred

Nathan," South African Jewish Board of Deputies Archive, M 103A. 8/5/1963. Page 2).

Yet impressive as the life lived out between these milestones undoubtedly was, I am

haunted by the possibility of an additional narrative that could be told about Nathan,

although it is almost certainly not one he might have told himself. What did Manfred Nathan


have to forget in order to become an exemplary South African? What did he have to repress

in order to remain an exemplary South African Jew? For cultural and literary theorists of my

generation and of my professional persuasions, dilemmas such as these present themselves

under the heading of "hybridity," a notion that the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha has

used to account for the jagged seams that join—without eliminating the tensions between--

the constituent parts of compound identities, especially colonial ones (Bhabha 1994: 102-122,

206 -211, 212-229 inter alia). But it is precisely the suggestion, or rather the "taint," of

hybridity that the triumphant, and Claudia Braude would say, "contributionist" rhetoric of the

official summation (this tell -tale insistence once more, one more…) works so hard to forget

(Braude 1997). Through emphasizing the contributions of South African Jews to South Africa,

she claims, Jewish communal discourse sought to ward off the specter of putative South

African disloyalty to South Africa. 3 Note how closely the ghost of a (formally) repudiated

antisemitism stalks Nathan's eminently tactful but nevertheless, self -congratulatory, account

of his entry into public life:

I took a fairly active part in speaking for candidates, such as Harry Hofmeyr,

Richard Goldman, and Harry Solomon, in the Transvaal electoral campaign of 1907.

My entry into public affairs was when I stood for election to the Rand Central School

Board during that year. I was elected fourth on the list. By that time I was fairly well-

known, but no doubt the support of the Jewish community stood me in good stead. I

was the first advocate of the Jewish faith in the Transvaal, and (later) the first to

become a King's Counsel; also, as related, I had taken some part in Jewish

communal affairs. But I am glad to think I never saw any trace of anti-Jewish

sentiment against me from non-Jews. (1944: 254)

Viewed through the lens of a contributionism that Nathan clearly also professed, the assertion

of a seamless join between his Jewish and white South African identities appears to be

thoroughly defensive, even apotropaic: a talismanic warding off of potential harm. 4 Read in

full cognizance of its defensiveness, the imposing solidity invested in Nathan's public persona

can be made to dissipate under anxieties that are at once individual and collective, the

particular burden of a particular South African Jew who textual oeuvre is, to a very large


degree, shaped by hybridity. Instead of unqualified and exemplary “belonging,” read

“difference”—or at the very least, read the threat of difference back into a historical

framework that seeks to disavow it. Against the received picture of the stable historical

subject that is constructed around Manfred Nathan in official Jewish historiography as well as

in his own autobiography, I would like to reinstate moments of rupture that are perhaps

inevitable for the diaspora Jew—or at the very least for this diaspora Jew of German descent,

child of the only Jewish family in Hanover in the Eastern Province, whose first “full

conscious[ness]” of his Jewishness comes in “a bullying ‘rag’ of which I was the victim, and in

which obscene attention was drawn to my faith” (1944: 37).

One such moment of exemplary rupture might be glimpsed in Nathan’s public

affirmation of Shylock at a lecture at the Jewish Guild in Johannesburg in 1899: “[I] said I

thought Shylock was intended as a particular person, and not as the representative of a type.

Shakespeare had in the character given many traits and characteristics which showed that he

thoroughly understood the Jewish nature” (ibid.: 162). Note the vacillation here. Nathan

polemically announces Shylock’s particularity, and immediately proceeds to evacuate it: (“I

did not think Shakespeare was a man who would cast a reflection upon any nationality”

[ibid.]). Jewishness born, Jewishness borne like the mark of circumcision on the discrete

individual body, has a way of collapsing back into a collective identif ication which the

individual, both type and token, must confirm or contest. At a certain level, Nathan's historical

romance reworks this same intersection of individual and collective identity in another key. It

represents a different, but by no means unrelated, attempt to articulate between the

individual life—a fictionalized reconstruction of the woman "Sarie Marais,"—and the social

collective for which the discrete subject is potentially, always a metonym.


2. Bad Fellows

Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais: A Romance of the Anglo-Boer War (1938a) is a text

that itself displays a certain amount of hybridity, viewed in terms of its positioning within the

literary field. The novel oscillates between canonical and popular literary forms and

repertoires, and re-inscribes, time after time, through displacing, the conflicts borne by its

precursor texts. Anterior to these texts is, of course, the eponymous "Sarie Marais," the

woman whose name is emblematic of Afrikaner nationalism in one of its most foundational

moments: Afrikaans resistance to British imperialism. In the Afrikaans folksong, Marais is the

very figure of, and for, the longing of a Boer soldier captured by the British, as well as a

metonym for the Transvaal from whose borders the speaker has been exiled as a Boer

prisoner of war. (See Appendix 2). The individual subject metonymically conscripted (con-

scripted) into the service of the national collective through her citation, iteration and

reiteration in the popular song generates a form of unisonance, a welding together or

coincidence of wills, that is fundamental to the nationalist project, as Benedict Anderson has

shown (1986 [1983]). That this unity is imagined is a corollary of the Andersonian thesis, but

it is a contingent fact of the case at hand that the woman named Sarie Marais, named thus in

the imaginary biography which the song constructs, fails to coincide with any single historical

precursor.

The question of the identity of the original Sarie Marais is as troubled as the question

of the authorship of the song, and whether one opts for her being based on a certain Sarie

Nel née Marée of the Greytown district of Natal, or on Susara Margaretha (Sarie) Marée of

the Transvaal, wife of the renowed early Afrikaans poet J.P. Toerien ("Africanus Junius"),

depends largely on whether one believes that Toerien wrote the words of the Afrikaans

version of the song, or whether one believes that it was written by the burgers of the

Greytown district commando in honor of the mother of their dominee Paul Nel, an d

subsequently published in 1920 by Ella de Wet, the wife of Louis Botha's military secretary

who had visited the Boer forces in the Greytown area in 1902 (see Anton C. van Vollenhoven

2000).

The "Afrikaans version of the song" is a phrase I use advised ly, because the text is,


itself, an adaptation of the American folksong "(Sweet) Ellie Rhee" dating from the Civil War,

and variously attributed to Stephen William Foster, C.E. Steuart and James Porter, or to the

more famous Philadelphia-based Unionist composer, Septimus Winner who claimed

authorship in 1865 (see van Vollenhoven 2000: 101-102, entry "Septimus Winner" in The

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Appendix 3). By the 1890s, "Sweet Ellie

Rhee" was certainly available in South Africa in written form in at least two sources: the first,

an American publication called The Cavendish Song Book (van Vollenhoven 2000: 102) and

the second, a popular anthology entitled The Scottish Students' Songbook, ("Sarie Marais,"

Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa). Additionally, it is conceivable that the song was

sung on the battlefield by American soldiers who volunteered on the Boer side (van

Vollenhoven 2000: 101).

The dissemination of the song must be placed in the context of robust popular

cultural connections between the United States and South Africa that constitute something of

a variant on Paul Gilroy's notion of a "black Atlantic" (1993). Since the 1860s, blackface

minstrelsy had been a popular form of entertainment for urban South Afric an whites, and had

some impact on Anglicized black South Africans who saw it as a representation (however

distorted) of the performances of black Americans (Veit Erlmann 1991: 30). The extremely

successful tours of a group of black performers, Orpheus "Bill" McAdoo's Virginia Jubilee

Singers in South Africa during the 1880s and 1890s, had an enormous impact on the

emergence of black popular cultural forms such as the minstrel parades of the "Cape Coon

Carnival" and the development of "makwaya" choral styles (David Coplan 1998-2000, Veit

Erlmann 1991). It is a curious footnote to our current concerns that Oom Paul Kruger, the

President of the Transvaal Republic, is known to have attended one of McAdoo's

performances, and to have been reduced to tears when the African-American singers sang

the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" (Erlmann 1991: 40). However, unlike the

spirituals or "sorrow songs" as W.E. B. Du Bois called them (1989 [1903]), which represented

crucial elements of unmediated slave cult ure, "Sweet Ellie Rhee" ventriloquizes the slave's

aspiration for freedom while conflictually affirming the superiority of romantic love over

precisely this aspiration. The ambiguous crossings between black and white, Tennesse and


the Transvaal, Unionist opposed to slavery and the heirs of Afrikaner slaveholders deeply

implicated in the construction of their own version of white supremacy, all mark the text of

Sarie Marais, provisionally reduced to the folksong before you, as a deeply creolized

intercultural nexus.

Given the density of this popular cultural genealogy, Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais is

all the more striking for being cipher rather than palimpsest. The text is divested of the

convoluted histories that I have just been tracing. Instead, Nathan f leshes his heroine out as

an embodiment of the standard features of the most canonical repertoire of Afrikaner

nationalist historiography instead—a repertoire well known to Nathan, not least in his guise

as biographer of Paul Kruger and chronicler of the V oortrekkers (Nathan 1937, 1938b, 1944

[1941]). Predictably, Nathan's Sarie is a device for highlighting the fortitude of the Afrikaner

women left back on the farms while their husbands, sons and brothers were on commando;

the suffering of the women and children in the British concentration camps; and sundry

deeds of self-sacrifice in the national cause—or, in the words of the book itself “the courage

of the men, and the bravery of the women. No nation of the world has stood up better

against adversity” (1938a: 214). Unlike the folksong, in which the heroine is passive, merely

an object of longing projected by the captured Boer soldier, Manfred Nathan re -imagines

Sarie Marais as an active Boer heroine caught up in such paradigmatically heroic exploits as

delivering secret dispatches to Louis Botha's commando in the dead of the night. Although his

“romance” (in the author’s designation) never achieved canonical status within the restricted

confines of a local South African “Great Tradition,” it clearly aspires to the category of serious

literature. In fact, the autobiography motivates the writing of the novel as an act of literary

historical redress: “I thought that for once there must be a story with a Boer heroine. There

are scores of British-born or descended heroines in South African fiction. Why not depict the

Afrikaner girl as I have known her? The song 'Sarie Marais' gave me the notion for a name,

though it is very short, and I have not appropriated its ideas except in the single episode

(differently treat ed) of a girl waiting for her lover's return from the battle-field. As the song

was national, so the heroine of the book must be national. . . It is, in the main, a record of

adventures during war time; and the heroine, I think, lives up to the standard required of a


heroine” (1944: 242).

That Nathan's Sarie Marais is a narrative whose general contours are given in

advance renders its particular choices—the interrelationship of fabula to sjuzet, or of fabula to

historical intertext, for instance—all the more pertinent. I am interested in certain contingent

features of the narrative economy that the text elaborates, particularly in terms of plot and

characterization. The novel, as its author states, indeed preserves the "love-interest" of the

original song--“a girl waiting for her lover’s return from the battle-field” (ibid.)--and will

eventually reunite the exiled Boer soldier, Philip van Ryn, with his Sarie Marais. Note,

however, that the obligatory romantic dénouement is achieved only after what are, to my

mind, telling complications superimposed on the pre -given scaffolding of the Afrikaner

nationalist intertext. It is true that Sarie Marais will ultimately marry Philip Van Ryn, the

young Boer soldier absent on commando or in exile for most of the book, but only once her

adventures in the Boer cause have brought her into repeated contact with the honest and

forthright British commander Major Playfair on the one hand, and, on the other, with the

treacherous Mr. Eckermann, a German con-artist, who exploits Briton and Boer alike. Where

Playfair is true to his name and functions literally a figure of redemption in the novel,

intervening in Sarie’s favor at various crucial stages of the plot, Eckermann, who is repeatedly

Sarie’s antagonist in these textual complications (the price she pays for rebuffing his romantic

advances), is wholly debased.

The respective fate of the two characters is significant. Not surprisingly given

Nathan's own commitment to Smuts and Botha's politics of reconciliation between English -

and Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans following the South African war, his text is able

to entertain the fantasy union of Sarie Marais and the British Major Playfair. The characters,

in fact, tease us—and each other—with this very possibility. At the end of the war, Playfair

announces his intentions to settle in South African and to become “a simple Boer,” or “the

next best thing to it”—and to take up farming in the district where Sarie and her husband will

also reside.

“You can never manage alone. You will want a wife,” said Sarie, with all the

zeal of a recent convert to matrimony.


“Well, what about you?” he said, jokingly.

“I am afraid you are too late,” said Sarie, “I am to be married in a little over

a month’s time.”

“And who is the lucky fellow?”

“He is a dear man—his name is Philip van Ryn.”

“Well, I’ll let you into a little secret—I like you but I have no desire to commit

bigamy. I am already married; and here is my wife.” He beckoned to a young woman

who had just emerged from a shop and was looking for him. (1938a: 324)

For all that it is regulated by the demands of a philo -Afrikaner historiography, Nathan’s text

turns its back on a separatist Afrikaner identity to the extent that it anachronistically makes

the motifs of Anglo-Boer reconciliation into the very material of its plot construction. Clearly,

Playfair is indispensable to Nathan's retroactive consolidation of the priorities of an inclusivist

white nationalism. Sarie is it's glowing advocate, and Playfair her foil: "[Sarie] had no

sympathy with those who had never suffered at all, had never lost their dear ones, and

nevertheless enrolled in the ranks of the grumblers and growlers. At the same time, she felt

herself always to be a true South African. Apart from her domestic duties, and her affection

for her husband, she lived for South Africa. She visualised the day when there would be

general harmony, and she often wished that the memories of a bitter past might be blotted

out for ever" (ibid. 345). The willful amnesia sought by Sarie is modulated in the novel as a

vision of pastoral neighborliness in which the van Ryns and the Playfairs meet to sing in

harmony to the musical accompaniment of Mrs. Playfair (1938a: 344).

Eckermann is another story altogether. The German is expelled or abjected from the

reconstituted white collective at the end of the War as the price of the latter's integrity and

integration. His ongoing presence cannot be countenanced if Sarie, Philip, and the Playfairs

are to set up (the national) house together. His multiple false, multiply false, identities are

exposed by the German Consul (ibid.: 329), and Eckermann flees South Africa for

Mozambique, in search of a sympathetic compatriot —one "Spengler." But Eckermann never

crosses the Incomati river:

In the dry grass immediately before him there appeared to be the decayed


trunk of a fallen tree. It lay at an angle to the path which Eckermann had to traverse

. . . Time was pressing, and he knew that he must hurry. He started forward, moving

aside slightly to give t he log a good berth. Then, in a flash, the log moved, and

Eckermann realised that it was a great crocodile. On the instant, it raised itself on its

forelegs and its horrible jaws snapped at him. . . The plunge down the bank was

infinitely faster than his ascent had been. And now— relief of a sort—he felt the cool

water about his ankles—an instant of assuagement—and his legs, then his body.

Still holding and dragging him, the crocodile sank beneath the surface—

making for the shelving spot beneath the bank which was its larder. There was a last

inarticulate cry from Eckermann— a gurgle as the water entered his mouth—only a

few ripples, and an ever-widening circle. Then, silence. Some bubbles came to the

surface.

The Incomati flowed unvexed to the sea. (Ibid.: 340-41)

I find the representations of Eckermann in this text fascinating, not least for what

they have to say about Manfred Nathan, philo-Afrikaner, residual British loyalist, Jew. My

argument in this regard will be elaborated initially through tracing a certain intertextuality

that is, undoubtedly, at stake here— although this is not all that is at stake. In the words of

the original folksong, it is the British —“die Kakies”—who are compared to a crocodile. The

predatory instinct of the crocodile that consists in drawing its prey to water is mapped onto

the common British practice of transporting their adversaries, captured Boer soldiers, over the

water as the prisoners-of-war are exiled in ships to India, Sri Lanka and elsewhere: "Want die

Kakies is mos ne s 'n krokodellepes,/ Hulle sleep jou sommer seewater toe, / Hulle smyt jou

op 'n skip vir 'n lange, lange trip / Die duiwel weet waarnatoe." That Nathan’s text repositions

the trope of the crocodile, deflecting it away from its original associations with the British and

linking it to the German villain, speaks of the ideological priority invested in sanitizing the

British in the name (“Playfair”) of an integrated vision of white South African nationhood—the

official doctrine of the South African Party, which Nathan helps to found and whose founding

is alluded to as “the germ of future national unity” in the novel itself (1938a: 347).


But there is, I would claim, something at work here that is much closer to home for

the Jewish South African writer Manfred Nathan, something so threatening that it cuts across

even the vision of an inclusive white South Africaness to which Nathan was committed. For

note that where the crocodile returns in Nathan’s text, it returns as the reworking of a

canonical South African literary topos for the uncanny (das Unheimliche , Freud PF 14: 363-

364), whose the Ur-text is the following passage in Sir Percy Fitzpatrick's highly canonical

1907 work, Jock of the Bushveld:

There is nothing that once comes across in hunting more horrible and loathsome than the

crocodile: nothing that rouses the feeling of horror and hatred as it does: nothing that so

surely and quickly gives the sensation of 'creeps in the back' as the noiseless apparition of

one in the water just where you least expected anything. . . . Many things are hunted in

the Bushveld, but only the crocodile is hated. There is always the feeling of horror that

this hideous, cowardly cruel thing--the enemy of man and beast alike—with its look of a

cunning smile in the greeny glassy eyes and great wide mouth, will mercilessly drag you

down—down—down to the bottom of some deep still pool, and hold you there till you

drown. Utterly helpless yourself to escape or fight, you cannot even call and if you could,

no one could help you there. It is all done in silence: a few bubbles come up where a man

went down; and that is the end of it. (1949 [1907]: 103)

Viewed in the light of its intertextuality with Fitzpatrick's text, the fatal meeting between

Eckerman and the crocodile is the source of an unease that is more profoundly uncanny in

the Freudian sense--more truly unheimlich this confusion of larder and grave --than the

recapitulation of the crocodile as a mere agent of natural justice would suggest. The deadly

crocodile that appears to be something else, a log—"something which is familiar and old-

established in the mind" (Freud PF 14: 363)—is both the nemesis of, and cognate with, the

demonized German character whose presence so obsessively and so seemingly superfluously,

disrupts the course of Sarie Marais's Afrikaner nationalist heroics. The uncanny with its

double agency (heimlich/unheimlich) , with its double agents (log/crocodile), reduplicates

itself still further by attaching itself to that which it incorporates: Eckerman's corpse —"an

instant of assuagement— and his legs, then his body."


3. Dismemberment

What conditions Manfred Nathan's investment in a sustained rendering of

dismemberment; in a "rending"—his word— (1938a: 340) dismemberment? I would like to

suggest that Eckermann's life, and more particularly his death, be read as a type of Freudian

projection, or, more strongly, as a form of transference in the textual exchange that occurs

between the narrator, Nathan's designate, and Eckermann, the narratee.5 Through creating a

series of elaborate textual digressions involving Eckermann, and not least of all, through an

emotionally and syntactically heightened investment in the circumstances of his death whose

barely repressed libinal components remain entirely legible (the assuagement of legs, then

body), Manfred Nathan, I claim, uses his 1938 text, Sarie Marais, to act out his own unease

regarding the status of South African Jewry during the 1930s.

As Milton Shain (1994), Gideon Shimoni (1980) and Patrick Furlong (1991) have

extensiv ely documented, the 1930s saw what Shain terms "an intensification of accumulated

anti-Jewish sentiment" (1994: 142).6 Specifically, the post-1933 emergence of modes of

“indigenous Nazism” (Shimoni 1980: 10) among nationalist Afrikaner constituencies including

movements such as the South African Christian National Socialist Movement (the

“Greyshirts”) and the “Ossewa Brandwag” which promoted virulently anti-Semitic policies

intended, in Shimoni’s words, to achieve the “reversal of Jewish emancipation” (ibid.: 113),

as well the ongoing debates on Jewish immigration to South Africa—all constituted major

sources of anxiety for South African Jews in the years preceding the publication of the novel.

The various Quota bills which typically used the term “unassimilable” as a code-word for Jew

(see Cuthbertson 1981: 121, Furlong 1991: 61, inter alia) not only hampered Jewish

immigration into South Africa from without, they necessarily undermined the always

contingent stability of the community from within. Beginning in the 1920s, the Immigration

act was used against Jewish immigrants on the grounds of so-called "economic unsuitability"

(Furlong 1991: 48). By 1930, Malan's Immigration Quota Bill, although it did not specifically

name Jews in its provisions nor did it target established Jewish residents in the country,

would nevertheless put an end to the immigration of Eastern European Litvak Jews. Hitler's

accession to power in Germany in 1933 placed new pressures on Jewish emigration that had


a considerable impact on the nature of the debate on Jewish immigration within South Africa.

The years 1934-1936 saw a rapid increase in Jewish immigration from Germany that in turn

inflamed existent anti-Jewish sentiments (G. C. Cuthbertson 1981: 119; Furlong 1991: 55-56,

"The Immigration of Jews into the Union, 1926-1935").7 One gauge of public sentiment is

reflected in the attempt by the Greyshirts, with the backing of Afrikaner intellectuals including

H.F. Verwoerd, to prevent the docking of the Stuttgart in Cape Town in October 1936—with

more than 500 Jewish refugees aboard.

The parliamentary debates around the 1937 Aliens Bill, whether on the part of its

supporters, notably but not exclusively D.F. Malan, or on the part of its opponents, the Jewish

members of Parliament, Morris Alexander and Morris Kentridge, or the non-Jews, Smuts and

Walter Madeley, reiterated the specifically anti-Jewish cast of a more encompassing

antialienism (Cuthbertson 1981: 122, Furlong 1991: 64 -69). For many voices on the Afrikaner

right, J.G. Strijdom’s and Malan’s among them (Furlong ibid.: 58, 61), Jewish immigration

seemed to pose a threat to the racial purity of the Afrikaner nation in a South Africa which, in

the argument of Dr. Karl Bremer, M.P. for Graaf-Reinet, had “more Jews in the total

population than could be assimilated into a ‘White country’” (Cuthbertson 1981: 122). By

1939, Eric Louw’s Aliens Amendment Bill would specifically declare Jews to be unassimilable

immigrants, and would extend the reach of unassimilability to encompass British-born Jewish

subjects. Louw’s provisions were also extended to recent entrants into South Africa who

would be subjected to tests of Jewish parentage that Furlong describes as “redolent of

Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws” (1991: 68).

Given this trajectory, and given the dubious visibility bestowed on the Jews as a

collective in the wake of Jewish calls for a German consumer boycott (which earned Hertzog’s

open disapproval Furlong 1991: 63), as well as the repeated clashes between the Greyshirts

and an alliance of Jewish, Socialist and Communist constituencies, 8 the rapprochement

between the van Ryns and the Playfairs in Nathan’s novel, the remarkable and unquestioned

assimilability of the British enemy, might be seen as a poignant response on Nathan’s part to

public assertions of his own unassimilable Jewishness. At the same time the German, safely

distanced from the post-war social reconciliation within whose framework he—rather than the


Jew—is unassimilable, is dismembered in order to protect Nathan from the loss of his own

membership in the white South African social body.

It is a curious historical coincidence that the psychoanalytic dimensions of Nathan’s

projective identification with a Boer heroine--narrative cross-dressing with a national cast,

shall we say—had been anticipated in a different narrative involving a women-identified man

presented by one of Nathan’s Jewish compatriots and contemporaries, Wulf Sachs, a

Lithuanian Jew, Zionist, Socialist, and the first trained psychoanalyst in South Africa. In a

1934 book entitled Psychoanalysis: Its Meaning and Practical Application, Sachs discusses the

case of a male patient who had been an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage:

As a Jew he felt the effects of anti-Semitism very keenly, but, as an

assimilated one, he could not join his fellow sufferers in an open fight and

protest, by, for instance, joining a strong national movement. Instead he

sympathised to a degree of identification with women. . . His interest in the

equality of the sexes was really a manifestat ion of his demand for equality of

races. So also we often find Jews who are fighters for someone else’s

national or racial rights. (1934: 140-141, see also Rose 1996: 49)

But there is something unsatisfying, to my mind, about an analysis of projection that restricts

itself to the limited circumference of the allegorical and that fails to linger over the certain

entanglements of transference. Unlike the case outlined by Sachs, Nathan’s working through

of the burdens of his positionality obeys a more densely imbricated set of substitutions which

I would now to engage--at the cost, perhaps, of revealing my own counter-transferential

investment in the regulatory dimensions of a chiasmus that is, for me, in the first place,

autobiographical. I have been concerned to stress throughout the course of this article that

no allegorical tearing of the veil of deflected nationalism—through the identification of

Nathan’s philo-Afrikaner novel as the analogical displacement of his Jewish nationalist, that is

to say Zionist, longings is possible here. For it is in the subtexts of membership and

dismemberment that Nathan’s apotropaic longing for belonging—on behalf of Jewish South

Africans—must more appropriately be located. The analogical impulse which would make the

Afrikaans struggle for national independence a bounded substitute for the Jewish one does


not carry over. For Nathan, the promised land is resolutely bounded by the Incomati river. To

the extent that a vestigal narrative of Jewish redemption is present in Sarie Marais through

the inscription of a resolutely egalitarian vision for all white South Africans, including Jews, it

refuses to become a Zionist narrative— in one sense of the word. But only in one sense of the

word. For it is clear that for Nathan, Zionism is far from synonymous with “a universal mass

immigration” to Palestine: a concept that hardened in mainstream Zionist ideology into the

call for shlilat hagalut or the negation of the diaspora. 9 Nathan’s Zionism refuses such

totalizations from the outset. In the autobiography, he states:

I had also been induced to join the newly-formed Zionist

organisation. In its inception this body, founded in Europe by Dr. Theodor

Herzl, was designed to find a solution for the everlasting persecution of the

Jews by the creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Particularly had

we been roused by the pogroms or massacres of the Jews in the Russian

Empire . . . The idea was to obtain from the Sultan of Turkey . . . the

guarantee of an assured home or asylum for oppresse d refugee Jews in that

country, together with such others as desired to settle there. It was

impracticable to hope for a universal mass immigration of all the Jews of the

world into Palestine. Purely physical limitations of territory would forbid this.

It was with these views that I became one of the first Vice -Presidents of the

South African Zionist Federation. (1944: 285, my emphasis L.B.)

The developments in Europe from the mid-thirties onwards had shaken Nathan's faith in the

prospects of Jewish nationalism, despite his longstanding and energetic public commitment to

the institutionalization of South African Zionism. By 1944, a passage in Nathan's

autobiography would tie the war against “the apes and tigers of Nazidom," and "the vipers of

Vichy" (1944: 186) to his growing skepticism about the realization of the Zionist program for

statehood, even under the protection of what he saw as a benevolent Great Britain. To the

extent that he re -inscribes within Zionism, as Zionism, an ideological difference that threaten

to deny the totalizing rationale of hegemonic forms of Zionism, Nathan marks the Jewish

national movement with the founding condition of his, of its, hybridity. Ultimately, for Nathan,


Zionism is a national movement that remains suspended, that does not transfer10.

Suspense is, after all, one of the most powerful modalities of diaspora, one source of

that which Jonathan Boyarin terms its “paradoxical power”: “On the one hand, everything

that defines us is compounded of all the questions of our ancestors. On the other hand,

everything is permanently at risk” (2002: 5). Given pervasive Jewish unease about the

contamination by anti-Semitism of the adopted South African home, the place of our birth—

mine and Nathan's—and given Nathan's suspension of belief in the redemptive potential of

the projected national home in Israel, whose realization is beyond him, beyond us even,

Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais comes to anticipate the profoundly apocalyptic cast that

Michael Green invests in his particular rewriting of this "old South African love song" four

decades later. Look around you, Nathan sings, sings proleptically but sings in time, in his

time, and in his diasporic spatial emplacement/displacement. Look around you, the house is

burning down. His is a prophecy invested in the peculiarly doubled consciousness of the

hybrid (Du Bois 1989 [1903], Gilroy 1993), a consciousness split between here and there;

between the dysphoria of emancipation and the emancipation of euphoria.

Sarie Marais: A Romance of the Anglo-Boer War. There is no linear teleology that

links Manfred Nathan to Michael Green, no certain literary historiographic continuum that

joins Ellie Rhee to Sarie Marais, nor one that might bind Sarie Marais to her contemporary

avatars, no certain apportioning of grace or Disgrace --only the insistent murmur of discourse,

between self and other, between canonical object and abject. In deference to the diasporic

inflections of these murmurings, I offer you nothing save dis-courir, or discurrere--a

movement back and forth (see Hayden White 1978:3), an implacable running to and fro in

which apocalypse hollows out the tense deferral of a future tense that cuts across, which is

also to say truncates, dismembers, both self and other. Sarie, why are you looking at me that

way? Why are you looking at me that way?

Listen carefully, in a different place at this time, and you will hear a new modality of

Michael Green's song, the wind in the wire and the sentinel's cough. Outside Bethlehem, at

Checkpost 300, in a different vernacular, a soldier holds an automatic weapon like a child in

his arms. And Sarah (your surrogate? Manfred Nathan's? mine?) sees the son of Hagar the


Egyptian whom she has born to Abraham mocking ( “metsahek” see Genesis 21:9 .

Sarah, why are you looking at me that way?

Why are you looking?


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Appendix 1

1. An Old South African Love Song, Or, Sarie Marais Revisited (Johannesburg,

1984)

Now you know why it's so warm in bed together

Look around you the house is burning down;

I don't think this is what they had in mind when they

sang about the home fires burning.

But it looks like it's really caught on in this town.

Turn away from the mirror to the window,

Oh, come on do you even have to ask?

You can't really believe we've got problems of a serious nature.

After all, we're armed, white, and middle class.

Or do you think those men in camouflage aren't out there

for you?

Attack or prot ection, there's a thin line running through.

Moustaches under peaked caps, looking vaguely bored,

Judges studying stains on the ground

That just aren't a metaphor for anything any more. . .

Listening for the freedom songs in the distance

You hear the wind in the wire and the sentinel's cough,

A soldier holds an automatic weapon like a child in his

arms,

A guard dog barks somewhere not far off;

And somewhere out there there's a boy dreaming he's on

commando,

Singing 'Sarie Marais' out on some windy plain;

An armoured machine rumbles by and he starts and he

wakes and he thinks,



(Green 1997: 151-152)


Appendix 2: Sarie Marias

1. My Sarie Marais is so ver van my hart

Maar ek hoop om haar weer te sien;

Sy het in die wyk van die Mooirivier gewoon.

Nog voordat die oorlog het begin.

Refrein

O, bring my trug na die ou Transvaal,

Daar waar my Sarie woon

Daar onder in die mielies

By dig eel doringboom

Daar woon my Sarie Maree.

2. 'n Verlossing het gekom en die

huistoegaan was daar,

Trug na die ou Transvaal;

My liefelingspersoon sal seker ook daar wees

Om my te verwelkom met 'n soen.

3. Altyd was ek bang dat die kakies my sou vang,

En ver oor die seewater stuur;

Toe vlug ek na die kant van die

Upington se sand

Daar onder langs die Grootrivier.

4. Want die Kakies is mos nes 'n krokodellepes,

Hulle sleep jou sommer seewater toe,

Hulle smyt jou op 'n skip vir 'n lange, lange trip

Die duiwel weet waarnatoe.

(S.J. du Toit's version of "Sarie Marais." See the comparison with "Ellie Rhee," below—both

cited by Anton C. van Vollenhoven, 2000: 110).


Appendix 3: (Sweet) Ellie Rhee

1. Sweet Ellie Rhee, so dear to me

Is lost for ever more;

Our home was down in Tennessee

Before dis cruel war.

Refrain

Then carry me back to Tennessee,

Back where I long to be,

Among de fields of yellow corn;

To my darling Ellie Rhee.

2. Oh why did I from day to day

Keep wishing to be free,

And from my massa run away,

And leave my Ellie Rhee?

3. Dey said dat I would soon be free

And happy all de day

But if dey take me back again,

I'll nebber run away.

4. Die war is over now at last,

De color'd race is free;

Dat good time comin' on so fast

I'se waiting for to see.


Notes 1 It is telling that, in one instance, the National Party went so far as to issue an election

statement in Yiddish (Joseph Campbell 2000: 109, Shimoni 1980).

2 In traditional rhetoric, chiasmus refers to a crosswise arrangement of elements so that the

second part of a phrase inverts the order displayed in the first. I am interested in

foregrounding not so much the notion of inversion associated with the figure, as that of a

crossing-over in which the discrete boundaries of each component of the figure are

potentially violated.

3 According to Braude (1997), contributionism continued to inflect the shape of official

Jewish historiography well into the post-apartheid era, a claim corroborated with reference t o

Braude's own positioning in this debate by James T. Campbell (2000: 96).

4 Witness, in contradiction of Nathan's assertion that he experienced no "trace of anti-Jewish

sentiment," the following guarded admission: "When my term [as Governor-General's

member on the Council of the University of South Africa] expired [in 1930], Dr. Malan, the

Minister of Education, did not offer to re-nominate me. Instead, he sent me an effusive letter

thanking me for my services, and explaining why he was constrained to nominate somebody

else. I had a proper appreciation of the sentiments which animated him" (1944: 270, my

italics L.B.).

5 In the classic Freudian model, transference refers to processes of emotional substitution and

replacement whereby strong affective or sexual feelings which have their source in childhood

relationships are transferred onto the analyst in the course of analysis, and are drawn into

consciousness through this constant process of acting out. Counter-transference refers to the

investment of the analyst's own desire in this process. For the psychoanalytic literary critic

Peter Brooks, the contractual basis of narrative renders it a potential site of transferential and

counter-transferential exchanges as, for example, between analyst/narratee and

analysand/narrator. Narrative truth, in his formulation, "arises from a dialogue among a

number of fabula and sjuzet, stories and their possible organizations, as also between two


narrators, analysand and analyst. A centerless and reversible structure, dialogue is an agency

of narration that creates as it questions the narrative, and designates the field of force of the

necessary fiction" (1984: 284).

6 Shain, in critical dialogue with Shimoni and Furlong (see 1994: 3-4), argues that

antisemitism was a signif icant element in South African society well before the crises of

urbanization and labor instability among Afrikaners, together with the rapidly expanding Shirt

movements combined to saturate right -wing Afrikaner political discourse with more virulent

forms of anti-Jewish feeling --that would eventually, as Furlong masterfully shows, be

incorporated into mainstream Nationalist politics.

7 I find the statistics instructive. According to Furlong, citing figures compiled by the South

African Jewish Board of Deputies:

In 1932 5 German Jewish immigrants came to South Africa; in 1933, 1934,

and 1935, in response to Hitler’s persecution, 204, 452, and 421. In 1936, 2,577

Jews fled to South Africa.

Ironically, during the first three years of the Nazi regime fewer than half of

German immigrants to South Africa were Jewish, 1,044 out of 2,664 arrivals. Despite

the big increase in German immigration, there were fewer Jewish immigrants over all

than in the pre -Quota Act days. The anti-Jewish hysteria that struck South Africa in

1936 was stimulated, in part, by the sudden boost in migration; 3,344 immigrants

came, compared to 1,078 in 1935. Yet the proportion of Jews to the total white

population of the Union increased only a fraction, from 4.28 percent in 1926 to just

under 4.75 percent in 1936, or 95,000 out of more than two million people” (1991:

55-56, emphasis in original).

The German Jewish immigrants of the early 1930s included my grandfather, Leo Gerson and

his sisters, Lotte and Nancy.

8 For an account of the involvement of Cissie Gool, Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman’s daughter,

leader of the National Liberation League, and first black woman advocate in South Africa, in

the protests against the Greyshirts, see Gwen Schrire 2003: 82 -85.


9 Various critiques have recently been mounted concerning the function of shlilat hagalut as

an apparatus for the erasure of memory, whether the memory of the “other” provenance of

diaspora Jews or of Palestinian claims to historical continuity in territory now subordinated to

Zionist national sovereignty (Raz-Karkotzkin 1993, 1994). The exclusionary identity politics of

Zionism, and its attendant consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are increasingly

seen to be linked with the contradictions attendant on the notion of shlilat hagalut (Raz-

Karkotzkin 1993, 1994; Gabriel Piterberg 1995; Oren Yiftachel 1999).

10 The word “transfer” forces me to acknowledge the contemporary orientation of the reading

I have just produced. Transfer--the English word does duty in Hebrew in the sole context of

the notion of a “population transfer,” an illusory isomorphism of complementary migrations

between the Palestinians and Jews from Arab Lands (see Yehouda Shenhav 1999)--wrenches

the term out of the analogical and Freudian contexts that have motivated its usage thus far.

The normalization of the notion of “transfer” in contemporary Israeli politics as a de facto

“solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is evident, inter alia, in government policies

towards the Palestinian inhabitants of the South Mount Hebron region (Oren Yiftachel and

Neve Gordon 2002), as well as in the creeping annexation cloaked by the erection of the so -

called Security Wall in Abu Dis, El Nu’aman (Gordon 2003), the campus of Al-Quds University,

and elsewhere. In protest against the unacceptable duration of the Occupation, one strain of

the many voices of South African Zionism that produced Manfred Nathan deserves to be

heard again. In 1919, at the special “Palestine Settlement Conference” convened in the wake

of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, one group of delegates sought to pass the following

resolution: “We declare for political and civil equality irrespective of race, sect or faith of all

the inhabitants of Palestine” (in John Simon 1998: 13). A sketchy egalitarian vision this,

inclusive of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and thus integrative to an extent which

Manfred Nathan’s civic egalitarianism, for whites only, was not. Unfortunately to this day, it

has not been fully realized and remains suspended in the future conditional which is the tense

of longing—not belonging.

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A Romance With the Anglo-Boer War

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