A farmer family gives ‘The American Spectator’ a profile in melancholy.
Gideon Jacobs has lived a life of the land. Farm-to-table was never a long sojourn for the barrel-chested Afrikaner, whose accent carries the history of his people. A base of Dutch, dashes of English, Malay, and a dozen more tongues built a language as uniquely native to South African soil as the people who claimed it as their own.
Less than 100 Dutch pioneers began the saga of Afrikanderdom in 1652, a century before Zulu expansionism brought that nation to fame. Former South African President Jacob Zuma, whose rule was a turning point in the post-apartheid era from rainbow nation to black nationalism, called the landing “the start of the trouble for this country.” Yet, even Zuma, for all his diatribes, had to begrudgingly dub the Afrikaners “truly African.”
