I, Afrikaner is a ninety-three minute Afrikaans film with English subtitles directed by Annalet Steenkamp, affectionately called “Makkie” in the film. The opening shot is a long close-up of an old windmill accompanied by the sound of the wind as it turns the rusty wheel. The camera then shifts to a long shot which shows dry, arid land and a figure that cannot be made out in the distance. And so, the nostalgic documentary begins as an indecipherable ode to Steenkamp’s Afrikaner family and culture, as well as to the land, the agrarian landscape, and the soil. Steenkamp filmed four generations of her family for eight years before producing I, Afrikaner.

When Antjie Krog’s autobiographical Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (Penguin Random House, 1998) was released against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and her own Afrikaner (generational) complicity, it evoked for the first time critical questions about the subjectivity of the apartheid perpetrator, figured primarily as “the Afrikaner.” Similar tensions are encountered in I, Afrikaner, and one cannot but recall Krog’s autobiography and the fictional film adaptation of it, In My Country (2004), as one watches Steenkamp’s composition of more recent postapartheid Afrikaner culture. But differences exist in its material composition as a film as well as its thirteen-year progression in the sociopolitical context of South Africa. The film is not as burdened by, or as hopeful about, the sensibility of the immediate post-1994 moment. Although Steenkamp’s eerie visual personal (and collective) memories do not directly reference or discuss South Africa’s postapartheid TRC, the film is nevertheless deeply entangled in the events and outcomes of that watershed period. And thus necessarily, the film’s cast, “Makkie’s” family, is deeply entangled in the politics of the land (and its yet to occur redistribution). Steenkamp relies on constant visual provocation consisting of extreme close-ups of items and actions of everyday life alternating with long wide-angle shots, primarily of the dry, arid land. The regular return to images of the vacant land contributes to Steenkamp’s construction of nostalgia for the past, for a time when the land must have been, like the elderly family members, young, green, and fertile.

Images of the ordinary shown in close-up—hair styling, the director’s own grandmother holding a new baby in the family, old photographs, old furniture, her family in church, her brother getting married—evoke subjective feelings of nostalgia, loss, and helplessness. At the same time, the wide-angle shots of the land, the soil, and the red dust of the Free State evoke a sense of vastness—what appears to be an extended openness that in the film is not only the site of the generational “home,” the farm, but now, in a postapartheid dispensation, a place of fear and feelings of threat and vulnerability. The film places a great deal of emphasis on this subject—and the family’s efforts to protect themselves and their homes—although the film largely avoids naming and identifying who or what it is they fear. This element of the film is the proverbial elephant in the room, and its meaning—which is their need specifically to protect themselves from black robbers—is understood only if one is aware of postapartheid South Africa’s racial and economic disparities. What the film does emphasize subtly and powerfully is the family’s overall vulnerability in regard to matters of race, age, and the ongoing loss of Afrikaner identity, as well as the knowledge that they will never return to their former position of power.

As we follow the lives of “Makkie’s” older family members, we are invited to view them from a position of empathy. The director’s grandmother has left her husband and moved from the farm because she fears for her life. The director’s sister-in-law suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder because of the series of burglaries that have occurred in the area. But Steenkamp’s emphasis on her family’s desperation articulates something more pressing than the feared theft of household goods: it emphasizes the fact that Africaner families are being robbed of their identity, which is intricately tied to the land.

The one character who destabilizes this Afrikaner-centric narrative is Shanel, the director’s niece. Not only can she speak SeSotho, the local language, fluently—which gives her access to the local black market, where she can sell chickens and produce from the farms—but her own identity is distinctly different from that of the rest of her family. Shanel goofs around with her black friends in the township, chatting in SeSotho slang as she drives around in her “bakkie” (SUV). In one scene that takes place in a shabbily furnished room in her parents’ home, she is shown dancing to the latest black pop music video and exclaiming with words like “ayoyo” and “ayeye” that are distinctly part of a young black dialect in South Africa. Adding to the sense of paradox is the sad looking wooden carving of Africa that adorns the wall above the television. Shanel’s relative solitude and singularity in this new identity are striking: a family member who may be her mother observes her briefly and then swiftly exits. Later in the film Shanel articulates her need to be with her black friends and how similar they all are. Everyone’s blood is red, she says.

The success of I, Afrikaner, then, is connected largely to its portrayal of Shanel—her dance moves and the fluidity of an identity that can code multidimensional aspects of “South Africanness.” The film’s repeated images of the land in its current postapartheid form—dry, abandoned—emphasize the theme of loss and futility. But the film does not question this loss and its place in the current dispensation, nor does it engage critically with sociopolitical questions of land claims and land redistribution in South Africa. In this sense it can feel like a self-indulgent portrait of white identity expressed subjectively as physical and metaphorical death. Only the portrayal of Shanel and her black friends saves the film from this insularity, although her friends, curiously, do not speak at all. Indeed, there is not a single black voice in the film. Although Steenkamp has described I, Afrikaner as a deeply personal and explorative portrait of her own family and Afrikaner culture (www.iafrikanerfilm.com), the film’s silences and omissions leave the viewer questioning where the (black) “other” is in postapartheid South Africa—or, to draw on Gayatri Spivak’s well-known essay (1988), whether the “subaltern” can actually “speak.”