Abstract
M.Tech. (Fine Art)
In this research, I map emergent female Afrikaner identities in relation to Willem Boshoff‟s
artwork Bread and Pebble Roadmap, which acts as the central focus to this study and informs
my own body of practical work.
In order to constitute a key to unlock questions regarding emergent female Afrikaner identities in
a South African context from colonial to post-apartheid, the relationship between image and text
in Bread and Pebble Roadmap is investigated. The investigation of this relationship is
interwoven with a discourse of an early form of the literary tradition that has come to be known
as Arabic-Afrikaans script, a term used to describe the "literary work which is written in
Afrikaans with Arabic letters" (Van Selms 1951).
This study adopts a qualitative methodological approach. The research incorporates textual
analysis and visual analysis. The study presents a visual semiotic analysis of Bread and Pebble
Roadmap, in order to map possible links between this artwork and a literature review of an early
form of Arabic-Afrikaans script, as a contextual framework in which to situate the study. Arabic-
Afrikaans, in turn, acts as a link which forges a relationship between two kinds of identities: an
Islamic influence on South African culture, and an Islamic influence on my life experience as an
Afrikaans-speaking woman who lived in Egypt for four years. These two identities, represented
by artist Lalla Essaydi in relation to an Islamic identity and artist Lizelle Kruger in relation to an
Afrikaner identity, are investigated through a comparative visual analysis.
The study intends to show how Essaydi and Kruger form a link with Boshoff, where each of
these three artists subverts, questions, and breaks down prevailing cultural and linguistic
stereotypes, and in so doing operationalises the notion of an emergent identity. Identity
construction, in the context of this study, is characterised by Stuart Hall‟s (in Rutherford
1990:222) concept of identity being in a continual state of flux, identity as “a production, which is
never complete; always in process and always constructed within, not outside representation”. I
therefore map my Afrikaner identity, previously seen as fixed, unproblematic and in line with the
national discourse under apartheid (Van Heerden 2006), but now seen as „becoming‟ and
„transitioning‟, situated „betwixt and between‟ (Turner 1969). This notion informs my own
practical work, which becomes visual metaphors of maps, in order to navigate a sense of self.
My practical work therefore attempts to embody a temporary space of an emergent identity. I understand this in-between space (Bhabha 2004) as a liminal space, as a continuum of spaces
in which my emergent female Afrikaner identity resides.
An important conclusion that I make from my research is that Boshoff‟s conflation of image and
text, which is consistent with Derrida‟s (1981) deconstructive strategy, unhinges the conditions
of the stereotype, which conventionally privileges a dichotomy in which different polar relations
reside. Drawing a connection between Bread and Pebble Roadmap and Arabic-Afrikaans, and
applying the conditions found in Bread and Pebble Roadmap to Arabic-Afrikaans, I view Arabic-
Afrikaans as able to unhinge its own seeming dichotomies: between Arabic and Afrikaans, and
thus between Islam and Christianity. In this way, I am able to argue that Arabic-Afrikaans is able
to reverse stereotyping and point a way forward towards the construction of emergent non-racial
stereotyping.