The other thing that fed into making people nervous right away was Bruns physically. He was very beautiful, I don’t know how else to put it. He was very Aryan, with those pale-blue eyes that are apparently so de rigueur for male movie stars these days. He had a wonderful physique. At some point possibly he had been a physical culturist, or maybe it was just the effect of constant manual work and lifting. Also I can’t resist mentioning a funny thing about Boer men. Or, rather, let me back into it: there is a thing with black African men called the African Physiological Stance, which means essentially that men, when they stand around, don’t bother to hold their bellies in. It might seem like a funny cultural trait to borrow, but Boer men picked it up. It doesn’t look so bad with blacks because the men stay pretty skinny, usually. But in whites, especially in Boers, who run to fat anyway, it isn’t so enthralling. They wear their belts underneath their paunches, somewhat on the order of a sling. Now consider Bruns strictly as a specimen walking around with his nice flat belly, a real waist, and, face it, a very compact nice little behind, and also keep in mind that he’s Dutch, so in a remote way he’s the same stock as the Boer men there, and the contrast was not going to be lost on the women, who are another story. The women have nothing to do. Help is thick on the ground. They get up at noon. They consume bales of true-romance magazines from Britain and the Republic, so incredibly crude. They do makeup. And they can get very flirtatious in an incredibly heavy-handed way after a couple of brandies. Bruns was the opposite of flirtatious. I wonder what the women thought it meant. He was very scrupulous when he was talking to you — it was nice. He never seemed to be giving you ratings on your secondary sex characteristics when he was talking to you, unlike everybody else. He kept his eyes on your face. As a person with large breasts I’m sensitized on this. Boer men are not normal. They think they’re a godsend to any white woman who turns up in this wilderness. Their sex ideas are derived from their animals. I’ve heard they just unbanned Love Without Fear in South Africa this year, which says something. The book was published in 1941.
On top of that, the Dutch-Boer interface is so freakish and tense anyway. The Dutch call Afrikaans “baby Dutch.” Boers are a humiliation to the Dutch, like they are their ids set free in the world or something similar. The Dutch Parliament keeps almost voting to get an oil boycott going against South Africa.
Also it wasn’t helpful that Bruns was some kind of absolute vegetarian, which he combined with fasting. He was whatever is beyond lactovegetarian in strictness. You have never seen people consume meat on the scale of the Boers. As a friend of mine says, Boers and meat go together like piss and porcelain. Biltong, sausages, any kind of meat product, pieces of pure solid fat — they love meat. So there was another rub.
Bruns was so naïve. He apparently had no idea he was coming to live in a shame culture. Among the Bakorwa, if you do something wrong and somebody catches you, they take you to the customary court and give you a certain number of strokes with a switch in public. They wet it first so it hurts more. This is far from being something whites thought up and imposed. It’s the way it is. The nearest regular magistrate is — where? Bobonong? Who knows? Bakorwa justice is based on beatings and the fear of beatings and shame, full stop. It’s premodern. But here comes Bruns wearing his crucifix and wondering what is going on. The problem was he had an unfortunate introduction to the culture. You could call wife beating among the Bakorwa pretty routine. I think he saw an admission to the hospital related to that. Also he himself was an ex-battered child, somebody said. I’m thinking of setting up a course for people who get sent here. I can give you an example of the kind of thing people should know about and not think twice about. The manager of the butchery in one of the towns caught two women shoplifting and he made them stand against the wall while he whipped them with an extension cord instead of calling the police. This shamed them and was probably effective and they didn’t lose time from work or their families. You need anthropologists to prepare people for the culture here. Bruns needed help. He needed information.
Bruns belonged to some sect. It was something like the people in England who jump out and disrupt fox hunts. Or there was a similar group, also in England, of people who were interposing themselves between prizefighters, to stop prizefighting. Bruns was from some milieu like that. I think he felt like he’d wandered into something by Hieronymus Bosch which he was supposed to do something about.
The fact is that the amount of fighting and beating there is in Bakorwa culture is fairly staggering to a person at first. Kids get beaten at school and at home, really hard sometimes. Wives naturally get beaten. Animals. Pets. Donkeys. And of course the whole traditional court process, the kgotla, is based on it. I think he was amazed. Every Wednesday at the kgotla the chief hears charges and your shirt comes off and you get two to twenty strokes, depending. Then there’s the universal recreational punching and shoving that goes on when the locals start drinking. So it’s not something you can afford to be sensitive about if you’re going to work here for any length of time.
Bruns decided to do something. The first thing he tried was absurd and made everything worse.
He started showing up at the kgotla when they were giving judgment and just stood there watching them give strokes. He was male, so he could get right up in the front row. I understand he never said anything, the idea being just to be a sorrowful witness. I guess he thought it would have some effect. But the Bakorwa didn’t get it and didn’t care. He was welcome.
Maybe I’m just a relativist on corporal punishment. Our own wonderful culture is falling apart with crime, more than Keteng is, and you could take the position that substituting imprisonment for the various kinds of rough justice there used to be has only made things worse. Who knows if there was less crime when people just formed mobs in a cooperative spirit and rode people out of town on a rail or horsewhipped them, when that was the risk you were running rather than plea bargaining and courses in basket weaving or some other fatuous kind of so-called rehabilitation? I don’t.
Bruns convinced himself that the seven families were to blame for all the violence — spiritually to blame at least. He was going to ask them to do something about it, take some kind of stand, and he was going to the center of power, Deon Du Toit.
There’s some disagreement as to whether Bruns went once to Du Toit’s house or twice. Everybody agrees Du Toit wasn’t home and that Bruns went in and stayed, however many times he went, stayed talking with Marika, Du Toit’s slutty wife. The one time everybody agrees on was at night. Bruns started to turn away when the maid told him Du Toit wasn’t there. But then somehow Bruns was invited in. That’s established. Then subsequently there was one long afternoon encounter, supposedly.