Lordspeak

R.W. Johnson

  • Passion and Cunning, and Other Essays by Conor Cruise O’Brien
    Weidenfeld, 293 pp, £18.00, March 1988, ISBN 0 297 79280 6
  • God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism by Conor Cruise O’Brien
    Harvard, 97 pp, £9.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 674 35510 5

One of the many delights in Passion and Cunning is the description of the author’s attendance at a National Party election rally in Springs (Transvaal) where P.W. Botha makes his appeal to English-speaking South Africans via a programme featuring 1. ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes’. 2. ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean’. 3. ‘Daizy, Daizy [sic], give me your anser [sic] do’. Such Afrikaner wooing of English-speakers, reflects O’Brien, has fortuitously coincided with the need to rephrase apartheid. Once it was Bantu Administration. Then it was separate development. Then it was community development, then co-operation and development. Perhaps, muses O’Brien, Afrikaner Nationalists simply had need of ‘the richer rhetorical resources of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy’.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions