Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

A young Boer guerrilla fighter, Deneys Reitz, described the defeated Boer commandos drifting into the camps in May 1902, as a rabble of "statving, ragged men, clad in skins or sacking, theii bodies covered with sores, from lack of salt and food . . . their appeaiance was a great shock to us, who came from the betterconditioned forces in the Cape."1 In the afteimath of the South African Wai (1899-1902), the Afrikanei seemed defeated - the iutal economy was shattered, family faims weie destroyed and mote than 25 000 Boei women and children were dead in the concentration camps.2 Yet in this apocalyptic post-war world, something stiange was happening. Afrikaneis were laughing.

This phenomenon was observed with wonder by English philanthropist Emily Hobhouse, who had reported on the conditions in the camps and the aftermath of the scorched earth policy. She wrote, for example, of the Van Graan brothers, who had both suffered enormous losses during the war. One "had seven little mouths to feed. He got seed potatoes from Repatriation for a promissory note, but the drought killed them. His brother lent him oxen to plough with, so he put in a little seed, but till it is ripe he has nothing to live upon. His beautiful house is in ruins, his blue gums all but two cut down, his fruit trees chopped." "But", Hobhouse continued, "how he laughed, and how his brothei laughed." Hobhouse further observed that "[l]ike all the other burghers [Boer General] De Wet is laughing. If he did not, he says, he should die. It makes him great fun. I do regret not being quick enough to catch all the Dutch proverbs which spice his conversation, nor the humour which runs through all the family talk they speak so quickly". In a rural hamlet in the Orange Free State, Hobhouse encountered "a poor man", who - when she offered him some meal - said: "I shall be so glad that I shall laugh without feeling any inclination to laugh." In Pretoiia, Hobhouse noted, the Boeis "say little and only laugh." She concluded: "There is getting to be something quite tetiible to me in this laugh of the Boeis which meets me everywhere. It is not all humoui, not all bittet, though partly both; it is mote like the laughtet of despait. We sit in a row by these stable walls and discuss every project possible and impossible, and then we laugh. Now and again the tears come into the men's eyes, but never into the women's except when they speak of children lost in the camps."3

This paper offers an interpretation of this "terrible" laughtet of the conquered, of why the Boeis "said little and only laughe[d]", and how this laughtei was interpreted and even mobilized by Afrikaner cultute-biokeis in the subsequent decades.4 This papei thus explores, fitstly, evidence of Boer/Afrikaner humor during and in the aftermath of the South African War, and secondly, the role of humoi in identity constiuction - both unconsciously and consciously employed to forge a particular kind of ethnographic volk charactet up until the 1930s.5 In this way "laughter" is discussed, firstly, as a material dimension of Afrikaner life (in this case, the context of a damaging war and difficult post-wat reconstruction) requiring theoretical elucidation and, secondly, as a rhetorical feature strategically mobilized in the construction of an Afrikaner "national culture". The paper concludes by addressing briefly historiographical and methodological issues experienced by social historians in using laughter, considering its possibilities as both a source and subject for historical enquiry. This study is thus situated in the growing international study of affect, and humor in particular, with the intention of initiating othet case-studies of humor in order to make the tentative first steps towatds a cohesive social history of laughtet in southern Africa.6

Seriously Funny

It is dangerous to talk about laughter. As Arthur Asa Berger observed "Dissecting humor is an interesting operation in which the patient usually dies."7 This has not prevented, however, commentators from classical Greece to the modern era from reflecting on laughter and its source.8 Although systematic studies of laughter qua laughter only began in the 1960s, philosophers like Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant have all shaped our understanding of mirth, as have later theorists like Freud. Yet, oddly, as a subject of historiographical analysis, laughter has suffered from the "tenderness taboo" (in Gotdon Allport's phrase): human behavior dealing with the visceral such as laughter - or, for example, bliss or sorrow - has been eschewed academically for fear that the researcher be unable to retain objectivity. Looking at laughter requires an understanding of the historiography of emotions. It redirects the attention of the historian back onto the human body (a focus that was arguably distracted from the visceral by the "textual" and "linguistic turns"). Febvre's famous call for a history of emotions has been followed by a growing body of historical enquiry, and the rise of the "affective turn".9 The focus on emotions stems from social history's longtime concern with understanding socio-cultural experiences from the perspective of those who actually lived them. The culture of emotions, also known as "emotionology", consists of the collective emotional standatds of a society.10 The social history of emotions has revealed how our conceptualization of emotions alters in time (and space) and concomitantly so does the social emotion experience.11 Certainly, in the study of affect, there is the enduring (and perhaps inevitable) epistemologica! tension between the univetsalist, positivist and the relativist, interpretive models.12 Within the widet context of emotion, the narrower focus on laughtet and history also runs the gamut of models between the labile and contingent versus the innate, the social vetsus the biological.13 Perhaps a useful formulation is the argument that the physiological capacity to have emotions - or to 'laugh', in this case - is universal, but the ways the emotions and laughtet - are elicited, experienced and expressed vary both at the level of different societies, communities and individuals.

The story told about laughtet is usually a happy one. Laughter is celebrated as the "best medicine", as both socially positive and petsonally liberatory. Yet the laughter sceptics or the "misogelasts" (hatets of laughter) contend that there might be something ugly behind the smile. These theotists aie useful to social histoiians in that they have not sentimentalised humoi and allow the possibility of a daikei side to laughtet. Schools of thought on humoi aie diveise and oveilapping but may be crudely divided into camps. The "Superiority Theory" of humor, epitomized by Thomas Hobbes, argues that the passion of laughtet is "[the] sudden glory arising from some conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others".14 Thus the response to the comic arises from a sense of dominance ovei others. By extension, laughter is allied to the normative goal of social correction - the need to belittle and thereby control the aberrant. 1 5 This conception of laughter has been drawn on by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who argued that laughter promotes both strong intra-group affinity and aggressiveness against outsiders so that "laughter forms a bond and simultaneously draws a line."16 In contrast, as Billig has shown, the "lncongiuity theory" of laughter sees the source of a sense of the comic in the incongruity between the fluidity and plasticity of life and imposed rigidities - a cerebral chortle father than a belly laugh. As mentioned above, some theorists have considered humor a biological force, contending that laughtei is built in to the neivous system because it serves an adaptive evolutionary function. These theorists maintained that the comic tiigget was neithei superiority not incongruity, but something closely akin to the former: humor follows an abrupt release from control. Laughtet, in this view, is thus a small (somatic) insuigence against social constiaint. In this evolutionary contention lie the foundations of the Freudian model.17

For Freud a joke was not just a joke. Both he and Henti Bergson, like Hobbes before them, distrusted humor.18 Freud maintained that laughtei is a channel for nervous energy, allowing the individual to touch proscribed areas like sex, violence and bodily functions.19 He perceived a Hobbesian conflict between an individual's desires (be they disguised as yearnings, dreams or anxieties) and social order. Repression (of sexuality oi aggression) was seen as indispensable for social stability: the Ego and the Id wage constant combat and jokes form part of the Id's armoury.20

Yet, Beigson complained: "the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity .. . and laughter itself as a stiange, isolated phenomenon, without any beating on the rest of human activity".21 Certainly, this ciitique tings tiue in southern African historiography. Internationally, howevei, social histoiians have shown that the nonseiious is not necessarily insignificant. Such histoiians have revealed that humoi is not a delightful but superfluous adjunct to social life, but rathei entirely central to social life.22 As Bakhtin had it, "Certain essential aspects of the woild are accessible only to laughter."23 There exists internationally a growing academic literature which looks at a range of cultural contexts for humor, from the printed woid, to performances, to piivate jokes in different societies. Topics within this research trajectory have included humoi and societal taboos and the relationship of humoi to social change.24

While the possession of humoi is taken to be pan-human, the idiosynciasies of culture constitute the context of vernacular humor. Interestingly, studies of nature reveal how significant nurtute is to humoi. Recent twin-studies demonstrate the strongly social influence on specific "senses of humor". The sense of humor shows low heritability: adopted siblings exhibit similai senses of humoi, while separated twins display very dissimilar ones. This lends weight to the idea that the cultural particularity of the laughable makes it a valuable ethnographic lens. "Ethnic humor" in particular offers ethnographic insights into selfrepresentation and the representation of the Other, which will be explored in the context of the Boer commando.27

There are mateiial concerns in writing about humor and history, discussed at the end of this essay. Laughtei is singulaily lacking in an aichive. As reflected in the case-study of the South African War below, primary evidence is scarce. Laughter vanishes into the ether. But the things that made people laugh, their observations on their own laughter, and commentary on what was popularly funny may remain, albeit widely scattered and only recorded as an afterthought. Diaries, memoirs and letters have to be scoured to produce even scant evidence and what mateiial they do offer is flat, lacking the visceiality of the teal experience of laughing.

Commando Humor

The very real experience of combat generated a particular kind of laughter. During the wai desciibed by the young Deneys Reitz, the social functions of humoi varied. An historian, Pretorius, has argued that the one thing which explained the continued survival of the Boers as a nation was their unfailing sense of humor. Reading through dozens of war chronicles, he was impressed by how the Boers managed to maintain their sense of humor during even the worst of the war. Here we can apply Freud's contention that laughter acts as an outlet for nervous energy, and can offer catharsis, providing a mental release from suffering. Intra-group aggression, engendered by the unwanted intimacy of commando life and the unremitting stress of guerrilla war, was tempered with practical jokes. Horseplay was integral to commando life: like placing the spine from an olieboom (Datura stramonium) weed underneath a companion's saddle, which would trigger an amusing detonation of bucking once the horse was mounted.28 Practical jokes promoted the relief of nervous tension. For example, General Kolbe, a fashionably hirsute Boer, proud of his luxuriant beard, awoke to an amused crowd watching his reaction to the fact that two fellow-officers had shaved it off during the night.29 Clowning performances by agterryers,30 like that of Ben Viljoen's famous agterryer, Mooiroos, and shared groodiegstories ("big lie" yarns), akin to the Ameiican south west's tradition of "tall tales", offered both social theatie and the concomitant relief afforded by depicting the ridiculous.31 In an analogous vein, the two Boer brotheis Du Plessis, "jovial in a gtim sort of mannet", captuied an old male baboon and - each holding one of his hands walked him on his hind legs to the President saying that "a new burgher had just joined . . . The baboon was by this time so overcome that he apathetically allowed his hand to be shaken . . . "32

This reflects the performance of the Freudian model of laughtei as a mechanism which eliminates excess tension. As Aithur Koestlei noted "laughtei is aggression (or apprehension) robbed of its logical Taison d'être; the puffing away of emotion discaided by thought." In small-group situations, like those on commando, one could survive unpleasant conditions and the unwelcome proximity of fellow-soldiers with the release valve of laughtei. In Decembet 1900, Viljoen's commando celebrated Dingaan's Day in the afternoon after addresses, sports of races on foot and horseback. The prizes made by means of small contributions from the officers.34 A year later, his commando celebrated Christmas with an ad hoc gymkhana, which included an entertaining mule race. "The spectacle of nine burly, bearded Boers urging their asinine steeds to top speed by shouts and spur provoked quite as much honest laughter as any theatrical farce ever excited."3 A Boer combatant observed: "I often think how surprised an outsider would be to see bearded and even old men" enjoying themselves in this way, like "overgrown boys".36

Moreover, recent studies show that the experience of humor may affect the immune system, therefore perhaps helping to alleviate stress.37 There is some evidence to suggest that laughter may help stabilize blood pressure, oxygenate the blood, stimulate circulation, and produce a feeling of well being probably related to endorphin release. In Darwinian terms, those "with a sense of humor" cope with the sadness of the world with slightly elevated immune systems. Laughter thus functioned as a valve of both psycho-social and corporeal relief and release. Viljoen noted of the men under him: "The Afrikander character may be called peculiar in many respects. In moments of reverse, when the future seems dark, one can easily trace its pessimistic tendencies. But once his comrades buried, the wounded attended to, and a moment's rest left him by the enemy, the cheerful part of the Boer nature prevails, and he is full of fun and sport."38

The jokes were sometimes pure silliness: Once a few English soldiers caught a Boer who spoke no English. They wanted him to hurry but he lagged. The English said: "We shall have to kill you! The Boer answered: "If you tickle [kielie] me, then I'll die laughing."39 Hilarity (perhaps, at times, literally "hysterical laughter") offered escape: Reitz records that in a particularly heavy assault, he saw his brother "disappear from sight as a shrapnel shell burst on him, but he rode out laughing, he and his horse uninjured."4 Positive communiqués from despatch riders would find the men "standing around the fires talking and laughing."41 Reitz records that a much-harried commando made it to the coast, many of the young men never having seen a body of water bigger than "the dam on their parents' farm." They reacted by "riding barebacked into the surf, shouting and laughing whenever a rider and his mount were thrown headlong by the breakers."42 Similarly, when, during the battle at Rhenosterkop in November 1900, the attack subsided slightly, a Boer combatant noted that he and his companions started exchanging jokes and their laughter competed with the sound of the shelling.43

Humor on commando could also offer a form of social control, as Hobbes, Bergson and Freud suggested. Mock courts were held, with intentionally outrageous charges, which were greeted "with laughter and cheering."44 Humor could thereby act as a way of passing on morality tales, codes of behaviour and in so doing maintain social cohesion.45 For example, a number of burghers badgered General Viljoen for permission to go home that he was goaded into noting in their passes: "Permit. ... To go to Johannesburg on account of cowardice, at Government's expense".46 Laughter could be a useful tool to excoriate a comrade. In a telling vignette, the populist but unpopular Boer prophet, Siener [Seer or Prophet] van Rensburg, had declared of recent sightings of a double-tailed meteor, that the comet's tail depicted a V for "Vrede" (peace). One night, however, a "boyish voice from the darkness ahead call[ed] out, 'Mijnheer (Mister) van Rensburg, that letter V up there does not mean Vrede , it means Vlug (retreat)' to the sound of wry laughtei in the ranks."4

As well as constructing and policing this internal hierarchy, jokes helped define the boundaiies of the community and fostered commando solidarity. This reflects the Hobbesian conception of laughter of the dominant discussed earlier, captured by Lorenz in: "laughter forms a bond and simultaneously draws a line." As Apte has shown in his anthropological wiitings, joking relations exist with "patterned playful behavior that occurs between two individuals who recognize special kinship or other types of social bonds."48 For the joke to "work" requires both shared knowledge and sentiment. On commando, the jokes called attention to a common identity, to a mutual belonging to a collective community in a Kantian "sensus communis."419 Thus the fraternal laughter of insiders also posted a no trespassing sign to outsideis.

Consequently, humoi played an important role in distinguishing between "them and us" on commando. Shared jokes like the following offered both ingroup validation and out-group tfiumphalism. Fot example, a practical joke was played by Viljoen's officers on some would-be hands-uppers (those who would surrender to the Biitish). Three Boei officers donned as much khaki as they could gather, asked them if the Steenkamps would like to surrender and fight under the British flag. They managed to collect cattle, sheep, guns and a new pony from the budding deserters. The pseudo-Colonel, mounted his "big clumsy English horses and rode proudly away" but the horse stumbled over barbed wire depositing its rider. He quieted the joshing of his two "fellow-Khakis" by saying that the fall had been most fortunate as the traitois "are now convinced that we are English by the clumsy manner I rode."50 Similarly, after a successful attack on the 1 7th Lancers, in fine khaki tunics on good horses, a stock Boer witticism was to dub themselves "English-killing Dragoons".51 Humor could be defiant, an act of mótale boosting chutzpah, ridiculing the enemy. Foi example, when the Biitish introduced lyddite, a newly invented explosive which had been used with tenible effect on the Dervishes in Omdurman, Reitz records that the Boeis "made light of it and dubbed the shells 'little niggeis' (klein kafferkies)" .52 War jokes lifted the spirits of the men, like their referring to "Martial Law" as a girl called "Maitjie Louw". Anothei example was noting of Loid Roberts of Kandahar: "Ja, Roberts fan Kan-da' arils ni Roberts fan ?a?-hiirì" - "Yes, Roberts of Can - There/is not Roberts of Can - here!" An injection of brio accompanied the der isory laughter this quip elicited.53 Satirical verse served a similar purpose, rendering the enemy risible rather than frightening. Deneys's fathei, the statesecretary EW. Reitz, wrote a poem while in the field about the Boer capture of a naval gun [nicknamed "Lady Roberts"], which included this representative verse:

Lord Roberts gave up fighting, he did not care a rap,

But left his dear old "Lady", who's fond of mealie-pap.

Of our dear wives and children he burned the happy homes,

He likes to worry Tantes [Aunts] but fears the sturdy Ooms [Uncles].

There are some experimental data that suggest humor engenders hope. Certainly laughter functioned to boost morale. Reitz records that General De la Rey would address the men in his "half-humorous, half-serious manner, and soon he had the men laughing and making light of their misfortunes."57 The Boers vouchsafed a black humor, swinging between uproarious laughtet and bittet empathy, at the cusp where farce becomes gallows humor.58 The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 offered occasion for this galgehumor59 :

Nephew, nephew, it is going very badly! My wife is terribly ill in the concentration camp in Klerksdorp, we lost some of our best men on the battlefield, and now we must hear that our beloved Queen Victory is dead.

Reitz offers an anecdote in which humor functions as the resistance against the enemy's stereotype of the Boets, arguably as an act of self-respect. He once stumbled upon "two wounded [British] officets. ... As [he] came up [he] heatd one remark, "Here comes a typical young Boer for you ..." The officers asked Reitz why the Boers refused to surrender when they are "bound to lose". Reitz answered "Oh, well, you see, we're like Mr Micawber, we are waiting for something to turn up." They burst out laughing and the one said, "Didn't I tell you this is a funny country . . . and now here's your typical young Boet quoting Dickens."61

Laughter could thus be a useful tool, used to diffuse tension, to rebuke an unpopular fellow combatant, to reinforce group identity, to appease a threat and to boost one's confidence. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, humor could cut across groups, both on the level of ranks and at the level of officers - and even across enemy lines. For example, out of the simple need for apparel as the wat wore on, the Boers took to stripping British prisoners for uniforms, thus compelling the Tommies [British soldiers] to adopt theit tattered discards. Louis Slabbert of the [Boet] Heidelberg Commando noted in 1902, that it was "one of the funniest sights I have ever seen. There stood the khakis, with theii sunburnt noses and spotty faces, neatly lined up weating old ragged clothes. In some cases their toes stuck out of broken velskoene [leathei shoes] and in othei cases their hair stuck out of the holes in their hats ....... One of the more comical Tommies grabbed his friend by the shoulder, pretended that he wanted to kick him, then said: 'Come on, get on, you damn Boer!' Both sides burst out laughing at this."63 In a parallel vignette, "The Lady Roberts" had been chiselled onto a naval gun (the gun of whom Reitz had written satiiical veise) captured by Viljoen's commando. His dispatch to General Smith-Dorrien, adopted a joculai tone: "I have been obliged to expel 'The Lady Roberts' . . . [as] an undesirable inhabitant of that place. I am glad to inform you that she seems quite at home in hei new suiroundings, and pleased with the change of company." To which the Biitish General responded: "As the lady you iefer to is not accustomed to sleep in the open air, I would recommend you to try flannel next to the skin."64

Anecdotes like these, historically atypical though they are, reflect the sense of at least some shaied humanity in the banteiing, of empathy for common suffering during this wat. Aiguably, social historians could pursue this furthei, to analyse how shaied humout shows up similarities in conceptualisations of gendei one could make an atgument that they are connecting on the basis of shared assumptions about masculine/feminine roles. Humour seems to be useful, then, in being predicated on and thus illuminating shared (gendered) cultural values.

Helpless Laughter, c.1902-1910.

Mirth Control

In the aftermath of wai, the defeated Boers were to become familial with one comic genie in paiticulai: ridicule. Alfred Milner, British proconsul to South Africa from 1897-1905,65 had a post-war reconstruction administration and Anglicisation policy that seemed to be intent on transforming the republican Afrikaneis into English-speaking colonists. There was a general feeling that he wanted to "[w]ipe out the last trace of Africanderism and damn the consequences."66 Milnei had notoriously avowed in Decembei 1900 that he intended to use the conquest of the Republics to expand English culture and restrict Dutch.67 With the Treaty of Veieeniging (31 May 1902), the Boei republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Fiee Sate became paît of the Biitish imperial dominion. English was made the sole official language after the war and the medium of instruction in schools. The future of Dutch-Afrikaans seemed unceitain - the authorities discouraged the use of Dutch and fresh cohoits of teacheis were brought out from England.68 The teaching of Dutch had been guaranteed in the peace treaty, but the number of hours was restricted to three. The Cape also abandoned speaking-knowledge of Dutch as a prerequisite for entiy into the civil setvice. In the post-wai education system, Afrikaans children weie widely believed to be threatened with Anglicisation. This lead to the kind of humoi embedded in the very mechanics of social power: the derisive laughter at the heart of society that ensures conformity. A common story told by Afrikaners was that those children who spoke more than the three houis of "Dutch-Afrikaans" permitted at school had to wear a placard that read "I'm a donkey, I spoke Dutch."

This silencing of the defeated Boers through ridicule seems to fit the models delineated by Bergson (to impose discipline) and by Hobbes and Lorenz (to display social aggression). Perhaps this was the humot of the powerful, but not the ail-powerful. The Milner regime still needed to deride those who broke the rules in order to both patrol and protect those rules. Yet where voices were literally silenced, laughter could still be heard. This was the laughter of the powerless.69 It was a kind Aesopian ctiticism, smuggling in social critique in comic disguise. Arguably this black humor was a grim acknowledgement that the gagged could still at least laugh.

The laughter of the survivor

This survivalist strain of dark humor allowed the preservation of some dignity and the weathering of life's vicissitudes in a profoundly damaged society. War left combatants and concentration camp inmates suffering post-traumatic shock, the scorched earth anti-guerrilla policy had left a ruined rural economy, and the social status quo in class (and immediately afterwards gendered-) terms was in upheaval. As the war veteran Ben Viljoen observed, "There is scarcely an Afrikander family without an unhealable wound. Everywhere the traces of the bloody struggle . . . "70 One observer recollected:

I remember that my grandmother chuckled when she told me how, on returning to the farm, Mooifontein, after the war, she and my grandfather found a donkey in Tabakskloof, at the far reaches of the farm . . . Oupa [grandfather] and the donkey pulled a very primitive, damaged plough and she clung desperately to the plough, laughing at herself the whole time (she said). I often heard her say "What could we do, my child, we could only laugh" ["ivat kon ons doen, my kind; ons (con maar net lag . . . "], even speaking of tragic happenings (though she never spoke of her dead children). It is she who said: "Oh, the English are not bad people: they just don't know how to run a good concentration camp." ["Ag, die Engelse is nie siegte mense nie: hulk weet net nie hoe om '? konsentrasiekamp te bestuur nie."]

Jokes arguably permitted the saying of things that otherwise would be socially threatening. Anything said "humorously" had deniability: It offeted the "I was only joking" defence. A helpful comparison is offered by Längsten Hughes, for example, who has noted with "black tongue in white cheek or vice versa," African- American slaves used coded humorous language to vent rage and their stoic laughter masked inner pain, allowing the preservation of outward dignity.72

Ethnic bonding was reinforced by this shared (albeit often desperate) hilarity. A helpful parallel may be drawn with apparently aberrant comic behaviour such as that of the Ugandan community, the Ik, which attracted attention during devastating famine. It appears from anthropological studies that theit truly desperate circumstances facilitated (literally) helpless laughter at the sight or tale of disaster striking the most vulnerable - the elderly dying, for example, or even a toddler burning itself on the camp-fire.73 This hilarity offers a moment of transcendence, a fleeting escape from a reality too awful to face.

Similarly, political jokes, it is argued, offer theii telleis and listeners a brief respite from the realities of everyday life, a moment when they feel that they (rather than the authorities) are in control. The political joke, with its incongruities and its mechanisms fot making those incongruities appropriate allows for a momentary revision of reality.74 The joke is a reductio ad absurdum by means of which the regime, the leaders, the hardships, the duplicity, and even the fear and humiliation are domesticated. As E.P. Thompson has argued, elites execute a iange of acts of public dominance and that these contiast with the camouflaged foims of protest - including humor - carried out by subordinated social strata.75 This veiled resistance is the laughtei hidden behind the hand to the mouth. In each of these jokes, a space is created (howevei small) that the regime cannot penetrate. Of course, any tiiumphs that emeige from such ventures may be transitory and solely psychological. Rather, the jokes are exercises in the maintenance of "self-esteem", which serve to maintain good morale.76

This ephemetal escapism coupled to the potentially subversive power of laughter, presents us with a glimpse into what Emily Hobhouse had called the Boers' "terrible" laughter "of despair".77 Malherbe noted in a representative anecdote that after the war, a Boer was asked by a friend how he was and answered:

Yes, nephew, my wife and children are all dead in the concentration camps, my livestock succumbed to the drought and the locusts ate my seedlings, but other than that it's going pretty well.

In the post-war world, some jokes may have been little revolutions, private challenges to the status quo. Moreover, as discussed, community (in this case, ethnic) bonds are forged by laughing at the Othei, in building in-gioups and out-groups. There was gentle but challenging humoi in a lot of the wiitings of the volkskrywers, like CJ. Langenhoven, which involved implicit political commentary. C. Louis Leipoldt , for example, noted that he wrote many of the poems in his anthology Oom Gert verte! en ander Gedigte (1911), in the direct afteimath of the war, with the "thunder of English cannons still in his ears." His bitter irony and lacerating wit were particulaily resonant in "Viede-aand" [Evening of the Peace Treaty]:

Dis vrede man : aie oorlog is verby!

It's peace time, man: the wat is over!

Hoor jy die mense skreeu die strate voli

Hear how people shout in the streets?

...

Kom, hier's "n bottle soetwyn; laat ons drink!

Come, here's bottle sweet wine; let us drink!

Ons her ons nasie in die see gesink;

We let our nation in the sea, sink.

...

Van lag? Nou, lag maar, want die storie's uit:

Of laughter? Now, laugh, because the story's out

Ons nasie's weg, ons kan daamaar maarfluiV.

Our nation is gone, we can whistle for it!

Drink, drink pu glas! Die son skyn deur die wyn:

Drink, drink your glass! The sun shines through the wine:

Is dit te soet, of smaak dit soos asyn?

Is it too sweet, or does it taste of vinegar?

Such vinegary humor can be interpreted by social historians in two ways. As noted, the jokes may be seen as akin to resistance posed by the subconscious to restraint and thus act as mini-carnival, allowing social norms to be flouted momentarily. Others have extended this notion. Ct itchley, for example, has posited that jokes challenge the social order by making the familial appeat unfamiliar79 These rebellions may be against the social otdet ot against providence itself. Significantly, joking seems to be more enthusiastic under totalitarianism than undet democracy. Correspondingly, jokes may be understood as small acts of sedition, as in George Orwell's "every joke is a tiny revolution. Oriol Pi-Sunyer regarded political jokes told in Spain as "the oral equivalent of guerilla warfare."81 Anthropologist Mary Douglas believed that a joke wotks as an "anti-rite", destroying hierarchy and order.82 She regarded it as a "rite" because it is an expressive, symbolic formation devoid of impact on real world affairs: it does not do anything.

This leads us to a counter-argument to the above hypothesis: that some jokes offer not rebellion but only its illusion, while underneath fostering further resignation and acquiescence. The atgument is that in a homeostatic system, humot can release tension and thus actually maintain the status quo. Laughter can be a substitute for the political action that could otherwise effect change. As Khalid Kishtainy noted, writing of Arab political humor, "people joke about their oppressors, not to overthrow them but to endure them."83 Similarly, othet scholats have also opposed the view of the real-world efficacy of political joking.84 Indeed, political jokes may sometimes be accommodations with authoritarianism. Such jokes assuage the guilt of the jokester over his failure to act politically. Thus the jokes are not an instalment of revolution but, quite the reverse, an index of resignation. In this view, the whispered rebellious jokes that attacked the new post-war regime were not really tiny rebellions at all. Instead they were alibis for those who did not (ot could not) rebel. These jokes allowed the tellers to live with their browbeaten spirits and ttoubled consciences. This kind of laughter could thus have been simply a sop for the guilt-ridden non-rebel, which allowed him to exist in society he considered unfair, even allow the martyrdom of fellow ex-combatants (like Hans Lötter and Gideon Scheepers) without precipitating rebellion.86 Gallows humor thus arguably (quite literally in this case) licensed fatalism and inactivity.

Jokes therefore offer the social historian a source for the possibility of a dialectic of submission and rebellion because in there we have heard a mixture of both quiescent and rebellious laughter. Moreover, whether humor operated as a consetvative or a revolutionary force, it is always a form of power and, as such, vital to the investigations of social historians. Thus social historians should explore whethet, arguably, for some individuals at least some of the time, a silent shrug or the hopeless shaking of the head may have accompanied laughtet of the defeated in Reconstruction South Africa.

The Mirth of a Nation?

Language and discourse are intimately connected to one's sense of self and, as Anderson has shown, the very palpability of language (in a print culture) generates the idea of a definable shared community.87 In a similar vein with specific reference to the post-wai Afrikaans community, Hofmeyi has shown that the vernacularising thrust of the Afrikaans language associations, established in 1905 and 1906, thiough the efforts of the taalstryders88 spawned a succession of interconnected organisations which began to link teacheis, clerics, small farmeis, student otganisations, lawyeis and journalists into a constituency. From 1916, the magazine, De (latei Die) Huisgenoot [The Home Companion], set out to promote the development the Afrikanei "petsonality" and was reaching 20% of Afrikaner families by the early 1930s.89 Culture-brokers fissured over class differences and promoted the entrenchment of a shared cultural identity with a common ethnic "character". The construction of the (ethnic) nation required the articulation of a shared culture, history, language, religion, ancestors, through a subjective homogenization of the (ethnic) citizenry, realized through an essentialization of the nation.90 Hofmeyr's study has skilfully revealed the self-conscious attempts of the men (and some women) to consttuct, thiough the wiitings and cultural practices, an "Afrikanei identity", as she puts it "building a nation from words.

Building a nation . . . from laughter

As an Afrikaans intellectual aigued, the mission of the post-wai wiiters was the "spiritual transfiguration of the wai so that it would become meaningful and not remain a biute mateiial happening ... so that [we] could again become men, with human values. . . . "92 Historical studies of wiiteis like Jan Celliers, Totius and Louis Leipoldt have discussed theii focus on gtief and pain, (the wai, post-wai poverty, struggle, concentration camps)93 and as Moodie has shown, by expressing and generalizing a shared "Afrikaner past" the new post-war literature formulated a consciousness of national (ethnic) identity.94 What has been omitted is a study of the humorous side in theit construction of a post-war panAfrikaner identity.

Two figures in particular offer the social historian examples of the roles played by culture-brokers in the self-conscious construction and mobilization of a sense of distinctively "Afrikaner humor".95 The first was Theodorus Johannes Haarhoff (1892-1971), an academic of the generation aftei the post-wai generation, a Rhodes scholai who studied further in Berlin, London and Amsterdam. He lectured in classics at a number of South African universities, an honorary professor at the Universities of Cape Town and Natal, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Science and of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, publishing widely in classics and educational theory. A powerful theme in his writings was the parallel between the growth of Afrikaans from seventeenth century Dutch and the development of Latin into the Romance languages. In 1935, he delivered a series of lectures at Oxford University on "Afrikaans: its oiigin and development."96 He was deeply opposed to the divide between Afrikaans- and English-speakers, arguing that the other language and culture should be regarded as an augmentation, not as a threat. His suggestion was that humor was an intimate tracer of identity and offered the possibility of reconciliation between English- and Afrikaans-speakers: "When we really understand each other's jokes, we shall really begin to co-operate."

He made a conscious comparison between Romans and Afrikaners: contending, for example, that the genial parodying of A.G. Visser (1878-1929) showed that "Epigram is somehow natutal to Afrikaans, as it was to Latin. It seems to rise from the soil; the vivid word and the vivid phrase of popular speech."98 In Haarhoff 's view Afrikaans language of the hearth or of the " volksmond" ( mother tongue), might arguably lend itself to humor. He spoke of the description of the plump farm-wife: "sy wou nog sit, toe sit sy ai."[She wanted to sit and then she was already sitting], arguing "[y]ou could do it in Latin, but not English (sessura iam sedebat)".99 Afrikaans had an established tradition of being used to convey satire as an apparently debased "kitchen-language". Joke books were rare but some were published, and there was also an idea that "Boeregrappe" (Boer jokes) could be used to preserve folk memory, like the amber encircling a fossil.101 Arguably, as self-consciously the language of the kitchen, of the hearth, it perhaps leant itself to everyday humor, embodying the popular culture, that might have been uncomfortably expressed in high Dutch. Equally, it was wrapped up in the project to "Aftikanerise" daily existence. This was in line with the trend, which Hofmeyr has dubbed the "redefinition of everyday life": the pages of Afrikaans magazines featured articles and advertisements that used every available aspect of people's lives and repackaged these as "Afrikaans". What had previously been "furniture" became "Afrikaans furniture" and what had previously been the natutal world became the "Afrikaner's natural world". And the joke became the "Afrikaner joke", humor an "Afrikaner sense of humor" and laughter "Afrikaner laughter."102

This strategic focus on the articulation of the ethnic nature of humor is illustrated in the example offered in 1924, by F.E.J. "Fransie" Malherbe (18941979), Professor at the Department of Nederlands- Afrikaans (Dutch- Afrikaans) at Stellenbosch University, from 1930 to 1959, who did much to shape Afrikaans as a written language and promote its cultural side.103 His doctoral dissertation (1924) was titled Humor in die algemeen en sy uiting in die Afrikaanse letterkunde (Humor in general and its expression in Afrikaans literature). This dissertation reflected104 the trend that "the sense of humor" (unknown before the second half of the nineteenth century) emerged by early twentieth century as an apparently essential component of a complete person. Similarly, on a larger scale, young nations and nations struggling with identity issues focused on "personality traits" like a national "sense of humot".105 For Malherbe, in seeking a modern national "character", Afrikanerdom had to define its sense of humor located in the volkstaal (mother tongue), that which CJ. Langenhoven had called "the expressed soul of our people." In so doing, he argued, "[i]t has joined the ranks of the most evolved of modern languages."106 Malherbe believed that, in order to be legitimated, the nation needed a "sense of humor" as a signature attribute, to indicate that the nation was both singular and mature. Equally, if a "national sense of humor" existed, individuals could be persuaded to consume rather than to produce laughter, (which might offer a challenge to norms, authority, rituals that the culture-brokers were working to inculcate). Just as Die Huisgenoot tried to give the Afrikaner a particular "personality", Malherbe tried writing a biography for the nation, giving it a character of its own.

Malherbe published a series of articles in the Huisgenoot in 1934, the year before Haaroff's Oxford lectures, under the title "Does the Afrikaner have a sense of humour?." His central argument was predicated on a distinctive, historically unique Afrikaner "national character", infused with an organic humor that was both unique and autochthonous. He imagined a wit that was, in other words, both native and nativist, born out of shared historical struggles. He affirmed that "Our literature is the most national thing in our land. Thus we expect in it the national characteristic of a sense of humor. Afrikaans literature comes out of and for the nation and reflects the nature of the national soul."107 He conceived of this humor quite literally as "the birthright of our volk."108 Humor, for Malherbe, was an organic Afrikaner trait, a biological essence coupled to historical experience:

The racially pure Boer is characterised by resignation in times of adversity and disaster, illness and death; but also by the clear sense of the comical in daily life, and the loving and humorous consideration of values in the great reality that surrounds us. . . . But the great humor also liberated us from idle wishes and fear and opened further horizons. Thus a trait of our race developed furthet.

His model explicitly contrasted the humor of the (Dutch) métropole with the laughter of the periphery, to emphasize the distinction:

We have more humor than the Dutch! Because we live . . . closer to nature. The best of us are still children of the earth . . . And humor wants nature, openmindedness, direct warm humanity. In our essential i/ollcsoul (soul of the nation), even temporarily cluttered by dogmatic doctrine, there is the nurturing ground for humor - humor that is so close to the tragic emotion, casting light on dark water.110

A key tenet to Malherbe 's central argument was that the South African War had given "birth" to this form of humor.111 He linked this intimate reflection to the stimulation of national (and by "national" he meant ethnically Afrikaans) "sympathy, melancholy and nostalgia [which appeared] tremulously through the words. Sadness for what might have been, longing for what must come, give many light stories a deeper tone."112 He declared that the

highest humor in Afrikaans also arises from sorrow. Yes, where is the secret of our people (volk) ... in patticular of our farming class, that they do not become despondent ovet the most dreadful succession of disasters? They always find a joke somewhere in theit misery. "Isn't it droll", they say, "that things can go wrong in such a funny fashion?"

Using examples from the war (that we have seen are universal human responses to the combat context) and perceiving them as distinctively Afrikaans, Malherbe put forward the notion that the volk's (nation's) "suffering, our uplifting, glorious grief! . . . [moved through] grief to glory, through irony to humor!"114 His argument was that in such dire straits if one small thing went right that was seized upon as reason to smile:

Finding worth amidst destruction . . . was the bitter-sweet necessity to survive complete ruin. And whether "seeing the whole picture" made one aware of the ideal of liberty of courage on the battle-field or the comic floundering of the Englishman or the woman as heroine or one's own health or a nest of eggs or a present of fresh meat donated out of a black [servant's] loyalty at one's own destroyed farm house - there was always something to make it "go well".

He argued that even ritual commonplaces embedded in everyday language reflected complex ethnic personality traits. The shared greeting formulae like "Hoe gaan diti"/"Nee goed, dankiel" ["How is it going?"/"No, well thank you."] was, in his model, an unconscious reflection of humot in a pessimistic-optimistic dyad.116 Malherbe extends this dyad by linking it to nature's role in creating a national peisonality:

Taken in all, nature was therefore a mighty influence on the shaping of the characteristic pessimism-optimism. Which is so necessary for humor. Such a racial characteristic is strengthened by the influence of the Afrikaner's nature.

Malherbe's model of autochthonous humor rested against the backdrop of the landscape's influence on the "volk" (people/nation) character). He declared that both the Afrikaners closeness to nature and the vastness of the South Aft ican landscape lent a "greatness of spirit" so necessary for humor.

But nature is more than a symbol of our nation's humor. The road of South Africa runs through nature. And the road of nature runs through the soul of a nation. It . . . certainly its influence contributed to shaping a mentality fit for humor.

Malherbe coupled this to an indigenised Calvinism, finding a way to reconcile humor with the dour reputation of Dutch Reformed Church Calvinism, by contending that it was not a dout, dry belief because it had become entwined with the very landscape and Afrikaner indigenous experiences, which had created the belief in a loving paternal god that encouraged humor in his "children".119

There was a further gendered component to Malhetbe's notion of ethnic humor. His theory was that women were less humorous than men because of a lack of intellectual and physical freedom - their work "is never done".120 Malherbe maintained that instead, the Afrikaner woman allowed herself only small ironies. He coupled this to their purported ability to stomach great hatdship during the war, which was a popular leitmotif among culture-brokers. He linked their lack of humor to theit remaining mental fcittereinders120

A greater gift of nature to our Afrikaans women was the unparalled physical and psychological ability to endure, in contrast to which in history her man cuts a sorry figure.122

Clearly, Malherbe had a sense of a hierarchy of humor predicated on gender. Similarly, he suggested that humor acted as a key to undetstanding othet ethnicities. The English were not the only butt of laughter. He maintained, for example, that the "bushmen" [San] had no humor of theii own.123 Malhetbe also discussed the comic stereotype of the trusty black servant oi turai "Hotnot" (derogatory term for coloured), often portrayed as comically animated. The naked racism is janing under the affectionate laughtet of the teadei at recognising the leitmotif, as in, for example, the demeaning "Vaalpenskaffet"124 and "Koelie-meid" from J. Van Bruggen's Ampie, Die Natuurkind (1924).1Z6 Malherbe added that it is not good comedy when the "kaffir" speaks first-rate Afrikaans.127 Here humoi opetates to patrol social hierarchies, and entrench stereotypes that, in a Gramscian sense, helped to create and police hegemony.

Certainly, this laughter of control warrants closer attention by social historians and offers further avenues for research into particular contexts of human (rather than the more univetsal types explored in the fiist half of the paper). It may have been accompanied by a slightly different but equally hegemonic kind of laughter With the post-wai escalation of uibanization (with many young white Afrikaans women diifting to the cities), the social cordon sanitaire seemed threatened. There was a great deal of social anxiety ovei Black peril panics and the growing "Poor White Problem". Concurrently, as should be furthei investigated, there was an abundance of writings which contained the stereotypes of jovial but asexual rural blacks as harmless but amusingly backward and Poor Whites, depicted as stock chatacteis. The nanatives of Léon Maté, for example, in Die Nuwejaarfees op Palmietfontein (1918) atguably offered a simultaneously soothing and demeaning stereotype of the asexual, comforting, faithful (but often drunken and dissolute) black labouring force. Similarly, for example, the writings of Jochem van Bruggen in, for example, Op Veld en Rande (1920), depicted white bywoners (share-croppers) as the salt-of-the-eatth but backwaid yokels. A comic depiction pethaps rendered both sectots a less tenifying social threat.128

Of couise, Afrikaneis did not just laugh - they were also laughed at. The laughtei was not solely intia-gioup but also extia-gioup, which presents research trajectories: laughter at, rather than by, a group. We have discussed how ridicule was a powerful medium of control in the immediate aftermath war. A fundamental strategy by non- Afrikaners remained to ridicule and risible key traits dear to Afrikaner self-image, like farming ability.129 For example, in an English-speaker's mocking "Beards are the only crop the Boeis have evet grown without a government subsidy". Such jokes were designed to stereotype Afrikaners as dominant yet uncivilized, hegemonic yet uncouth. Just Paddy developed into a stock chaiactei in Irish jokes, Van der Merwe became the stereotype: a bigoted, dim-witted, rural, and naive stock character by the South African Wai, Van dei Meiwe had come to signify a typical name.132 As Posel has shown, by the 1970s, with increasing Afrikanei political hegemony, "Van dei Merwe jokes" - with Van der Merwe depicted as Apartheid apparatchik - became in vogue, as a steieotype against whom white Englishspeaking South Africans (and possibly some middle class Afrikaans groups too) could underline their more liberal and cosmopolitan identities.133 The history of the Van der Merwe joke still needs to be written, with paiticulai on the vigoui of this stock figure undei a range of social conditions and historical moments.

Humor and the Social Historian

Such possible future research opportunities require reflection on methodological issues confronting the historian. As the preceding discussion has tried to illustrate, humor is clearly a useful way into an understanding of social relations. Humor functions as an expression and deployment of (class, facial, ethnic, gendered, generational and so on) power, and offers a lens into the friable interface between the private and the collective, the personal and the state. Fine has suggested the importance of an "idioculture" of knowledge, habits and so on among emerging groups to increase cohesion.134 Used as "in-group" indicatots, jokes can offer the historian some cultural traces to sketch the transition in group consciousness in the southern African case-study from, for example, the pre-war Kruger's old-style Northern Republicanism (which excluded Cape Afrikaners) to a broader post-wat pan- Afrikanerdom. Although histoi ians can find mention of this in the official speeches of leaders, the evidence for a shift of feeling amongst otdinary folk is both elusive and ephemeral, so jokes offer at least some suggestion as to a change in what was populatly tegatded as the idiocultural possession of a nascent group in the process of developing. Certainly, periodization would be challenging, encountering the difficulties faced by historians of emotions, for example.136

Similarly, in throwing light on the individual-state interface humor has been used constructively to prevent stereotyped thinking about, for example, damaged societies. As Thutston has shown, a study of jokes can curb an historian from making banal assumptions about a person's relationship with the polity in a wounded society.137 As Thurston has revealed of the Stalinist Terror and Levine has shown of African- American oppression, jokes may show a counterconventional response to traumatic events. Moreover, as, for example, Thurston has argued of Levine's work, jokes can be particulatly useful contradict the picture of Pavlovian passivity of historical subjects.138

"Laughter" as a source is challenging. Historians suffer the typical difficulties endured in oral history and mentalité analyses.139 This is a chronic problem for social histotians (in other contexts too) who are faced with a dearth of original documents wtitten by the people themselves. There is the everyday problem of the inability to quantify the ptevalence of jokes.140 Moreover, there is a particular danger in assuming ethnographic uniqueness. Comparative studies help reduce the error that contemporaneous commentators like Boer General ViIj oen and subsequent culture-brokers made, in seeing the universal as particular and unique.

Moreover there is the danget of simply not getting the joke. If we accept the premise that what we find amusing changes over time, there is the probability that histotians will simply miss jokes and humour in the written sources. The equivocation of such fugitive fotms of everyday interaction evade easy classification. As Gay has noted, the multiplicities of laughtet ate so vast that "they all but frustrate mapping" and "are exceedingly ambiguous in their intentions and theit effects".141 Perhaps there is some intellectual comfort in arguing that not getting the joke might actually be useful methodologically. For social histotians, it might atguably be a way in to understanding what still needs to be undetstood, as it were. As Darnton observed, realizing that you are not getting jokes is one of the ways "you can see whete to giasp a foreign system of meaning in oidei to unravel it".142

In writing histories of humor, historians may explore how people use humor strategically in diveise contexts as, foi example, socially as protest against the conventions of society or individually for self-definition. Besides this, histoiians may analyze where humoi has been instiumental in mobilizing sympathizeis and support and helped to release tension duiing prolonged struggle. Humor can cement groups in a closed community of laughter It has wotked to regulate identity and control behaviour Humor thus may seive the histoiian as an index of social change. There is, of couise, a distinction between a "history of humot" and a "history of laughter." The latter would require not only an analysis of cultural residue (like jokes, humorous anecdotes and so on) and how cultuie-btokeis contemporaneously understood humor (or how it was mobilised in the rhetorical machinery of identity construction) but also the affective or emotional in an historical sense. Thus humor is perhaps the mind's construction and laughtet the gut's reaction, and both have a social history.

Conclusions

This paper has thus firstly explored an historical phenomenon that at first glance appears bizarre: the laughter of a particular group of men in a traumatic war and a ensuing deeply damaged post-war social milieu. The purpose of this section of the papei was simply initially to provide evidence of this social history phenomenon and then to try to explain it (because at first it appears anomalous) using various theories, which concomitantly also show that there were different reasons and roles for the various shades of laughtei of the combatants. While this is certainly deeply tooted in an histoiical moment, the evidence offered of the "laughtei of the Boeis" from these primary sources, this part of the papei is perhaps more useful in showcasing the general socio-psychological functions of humor in groups, particularly in traumatic situations. Here universal human responses may be studied by social histoiians.14

However, the papei then moved into the more (ethnogiaphically) particular It was the South African War and its immediate aftermath that saw the founding and entrenching of a rhetorical tradition by the historical subjects themselves. Thus, for example, the Boer General Viljoen observed that the men under him reacted to combat with humot (which, as we have seen, is a univeisal human tendency) but he assumed it to be idiosynciatic of the "The Afrikandei charactei".144 This, in effect, offers a bridge to the second part of the paper: the exploration of how a paiticulai undeistanding of "Afrikaner humor" was used in the efforts by culture-brokers to articulate a group identity. Here the papei has focused on "meta-laughter", the constiuction of a paiticulai sense of humoi that accompanied the articulation of Afrikanei identity in the fust decades of the twentieth century. The paper concluded by offering some further research possibilities and exploi ing the challenges of using humoi as theme and resource in social history.