A “New” South African Family Romance

Abstract

Former President F. W. De Klerk’s autobiography The Last Trek: A New Beginning, published in 1999, begins with some intriguing revelations about the family history of the figure who presided over the dismantling of apartheid (somewhat ambivalently, it must be stated) and took on the task of leading the National Party (NP) into democracy. These revelations included that of his blood ties to an enslaved Indian woman. The author takes pains to show that “the story of the De Klerks was the story of the Afrikaner nation,” an argument he bolsters with the fact that “Hendrik Bibault, the half-brother of one of our ancestors, Susanna, was the first to call himself an Afrikaner—or an African” (De Klerk 3). The famous cry “Ik ben een Afrikaander” has often been claimed as the founding moment for “the white tribe of Africa.” De Klerk, however, takes this claim in what may be a surprising direction, given the infamous Afrikaner obsession with racial purity. Susana, he proceeds to reveal, was the daughter of a Dutch settler named Detlef Bibault and an enslaved woman named Diana of Bengal. Susana’s daughter Engela in turn married De Klerk’s “direct ancestor” Barend De Klerk in 1737 (De Klerk 4). The story of the De Klerk family and the Afrikaner nation can, in this version, only be multiracial from its very beginnings. Of course, he hastens to add: “This was part of my genealogy of which we did not speak—and of which I did not know—when I was a child” (De Klerk 4).