Manlikheid en magsverlies in die Afrikaanse jagliteratuur sedert 1994 : Die olifantjagters van Piet van Rooyen en Groot vyf van Johann Botha

Abstract

Faced with the burden of apartheid history and political changes in a democratic South Africa, the male characters in Die olifantjagters (Piet van Rooyen) and Groot vyf (Johann Botha) take recourse to the apparently uncomplicated, primordial hunting field. The narrator in Van Rooyen's novel starts an ecological and developmental hunting project with the Namibian Bushmen. When he ventures into Angola on a hunting expedition he is stripped of his constructive intentions towards the African Other as he slides back into the stereotypical behaviour of the exploitative colonial hunter. The male characters in Groot vyf (Johann Botha) experience the dissolution of the bond between power and white male identity as the equivalent of the possible extinction of the Afrikaner man as an "endangered species". While shooting a film in the Kruger National Park during the 1994 elections Coen Buys is apparently bitten by a (highly symbolic) black mamba. Coen's anxieties about the future of the Afrikaner in a democratic South Africa can only be allayed in the ensuing trance experience that is a dramatisation of Nelson Mandela's inauguration as president.