When two worlds collide

Antjie Krog's Blood's Inner Rhyme is part-autobiography, part-reportage and part-fiction, the main theme developed through a varied multitude of narratives and conversations between the writer and her mother, two personally devoted yet ideologically opposed beings with a shared love for the Free State writes Johann Krieglar

- Johann Krieglar

A precocious schoolgirl poem by Antjie Krog hit the headlines in 1970 and, ever since, she has roiled the Afrikaner’s consciousness and conscience. Her lucid and even lyrical reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Country of My Skull (1998) was an indictment of the erstwhile apartheid regime - and a journalistic hit.

A few years later, in A Change of Tongue (2003), she confronted the existential struggle with change, and with adaptation across language and cultural boundaries in all its complexity. And now, in Blood’s Inner Rhyme, she again takes on the same essential message.

Unlike her two earlier books, Blood’s Inner Rhyme is more relaxed: its approach is less polemical, its touch lighter. A central theme is still the challenge facing white South Africans – specifically Afrikaners – to adapt to socio-political change, but this is now presented in a make-believe personal dialogue between the author and her mother. Even if we weren't aware of this to start with, by the end of the book, we know that her mother is Dot Serfontein, in her own right a formidable proponent of the Afrikaans language who tells us that she herself grew up in a home where people wrestled with words in order to express the unusual.