The Afrikaner as villain

By Anton I Botha

I was mildly amused the other day when my brother introduced me to the PC game Far Cry 2 which has villains that speak Afrikaans. While trekking through the African savannah, players are confronted with multiple ‘baddies’ that the hero (American of course) has to take out through any means necessary.

Being an Afrikaner by origin, it was a somewhat strange experience for me to see round after round of digital ammunition being pumped into Afrikaans-speaking computer-generated bots; or what can be thought of as “Shooting the Boer”. If I were wired like Steve Hofmeyr I’d probably want to throw the game into the Jukskei River.

Playing this game made me think about a number of instances in the popular media where Afrikaners, or at least ghastly attempts at Afrikaans accents, have made appearances as the ‘baddies’ in popular Hollywood films. Therefore, Afrikaners, or at least, characters with strange approximations of Afrikaans accents, are the ‘bad guys’, not in films about Apartheid, but in popular films with no specific South African context.

Towards the end of the apartheid years there was Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover who do battle with an evil South African diplomat and his henchmen. (The tag line is “Diplomatic immunity Mr Riggs”.) Then there was Hard Target (1993) in which the hero opposite Arnold Vosloo has all sort of great lines including threatening to cut a steak out of a rather sinewy Jean Claude van Damme. To this day, I respond to both films with tears of hilarity at the bad acting and the atrocious accents. More recently white South African men (again with really bad accents) have made villainous appearances in Sum of All Fears (2002), The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and Red (2010), to mention but a few. In the Manchurian Candidate a South African scientist leads a mind control experiment to bend the will of an American politician. In the Sum of All Fears, a white South African arms dealer is responsible for the retrieval and sale of a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group. And in Red, a mercenary team of white Afrikaans ex-paramilitaries are sent to kill the hero played by Bruce Willis.

Perhaps we should throw all of these films into the ocean too?

What does this mean for the Afrikaner and in particular Afrikaner identity? Well, as far as I can see there are three ways to look at it.

You could get upset and wonder why the Afrikaner is portrayed in such a negative light, especially after the wonderwerk of 1994.

Surely we are no longer the skunks of the world? Why must we be the villains? Why should the current generation of Afrikaners pay for the sins of their fathers?

Another way to look at it is that the Germans have had a rough time of it since the 2nd World War as have the Arabs since 9/11. If there’s a bad guy role, the odds are he’s going to be German, Arabic, or lately North Korean (thanks to the wacky antics of Kim Jong-il). So, we can be altruistic and share the ‘villain load’. And we’re getting an idea of what it’s been like for Germans the last 60 years or so.

Or you could see our inclusion in the villain list as a sign of Hollywood’s respect for our abilities. After all — a scientist who perfects mind control? And think of the logistics involved in smuggling nuclear weapons across international borders. And let’s not forget taking on Bruce ‘Brutal Bruno’ Wills. Of course a team of mercenaries equipped with machine guns and night vision never stood a chance against one man with a 9mm Beretta, but how were they supposed to know they were taking on ‘the Wills’.

These kinds of ‘negative’ portrayals say something about the Afrikaner (a small ethnic group of less than 5 million people) and their perceived ingenuity. It would seem, good or bad, that the Afrikaner has made an impact on Hollywood and, by implication, the world’s psyche. I, for one, think it’s great that we’ve been picked up by the Hollywood bad guy radar. There is nothing worst than being relegated to the pages of historical irrelevance by being ignored by the popular media. You never see Peruvian or Surinamese bad guys in movies or PC games. As the saying goes, “I don’t care what people say about me, as long as they are still talking about me”. And the reason for taking this position is quite simple, chicks dig bad guys. I would like them to get the accent right though. But I guess, in the end, and unlike Steve Hofmeyr, you have to learn the trick of never taking yourself, or your ethnic origins, too seriously.

Anton is an awaiting PhD student, and wonders about stuff sometimes…but as you have probably gathered…only sometimes.