Die representasie van die vrou in die verse van die Eerste Afrikaanse Taalbeweging

The Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (G.R.A.; “Association of Real Afrikaners”) published its first volume of Afrikaans poems in 1878. It is probable that the collection of mostly anonymous poems, named Afrikaanse gedigte : Eerste versameling 1878 in a facsimile edition of 1975, does not contain a single poem written by a woman. The reason for this is that the Association did not allow women to participate in their project to establish Afrikaans as a written language and resisted the idea of women contributing to their publications. The G.R.A. was guided by a number of considerations. Firstly, the school system in the Cape Colony produced virtually no well-educated Afrikaans-speaking women who could, or would support their cause. Such higher education as young Afrikaans women from good homes did receive in the Colony around 1875, was offered in English, by English-speaking teachers, which made these young ladies particularly unsuited to the cause and indeed a subject of concern to the Association. Secondly, the G.R.A. did not trust women with its secrets. The Association faced opposition and revilement from institutions which supported English and / or Dutch as the civilized languages of the Cape, and it needed collaborators it could trust. Thirdly, an educated woman engaged in political, journalistic or artistic activities contradicted the ideal held by the G.R.A. for Afrikaans women. They saw the ideal Afrikaner woman as a wife and mother, a person who runs the home and looks after the material and spiritual well-being of her children. The Bible itself seemed to support the G.R.A.’s image of womanhood, which was important because the deeper purpose of the Association was to protect and promote the conservative Christian values prevailing amongst the Afrikaans-speaking population of the Cape. Fourthly, women had no voting rights at the time and Afrikaans women were not known to participate in cultural or semi-political organisations such as the G.R.A. So there seemed little to gain from female contributors. Fifthly, the leaders of the G.R.A. derived their literary sensibility from conservative, Protestant Dutch literature from the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries, characterised by old-fashioned, Biblical misogyny. The Association’s attempt to silence female voices did not prevent male poets from writing about women, however, and women did enter into Afrikaans poetry in the form of male representations. For instance, the English-bred Boer girls entered Afrikaans verse as objects of derision. These representations in Afrikaanse gedigte. Eerste versameling 1878 are discussed in this article. The discussion is preceded by an overview of the reasons why the founding fathers of the G.R.A rejected female participation in their project. The article is based on the MA-thesis of Delene Pienaar, completed under the supervision of Etienne Britz at the University of Stellenbosch in 1997.