Ich kehre zurück nach Afrika

Stefanie Gercke:
Ich kehre zurück nach Afrika 
München: Knaur, 1998
460 S.
ISBN 3-426-66031-8
(Original paperback edition)

Henrietta, a 20 years old young German is in love with David, the son of an African Diplomat. To hinder this relationship between their daughter and the young African, Henrietta's parents decide to send her to live in South Africa with her uncle Hans. If the decision of Henrietta's parents has a corrective and punitive character, it fills their daughter, who had always dreamt of returning to Africa, her place of birth, with joy.

But Henrietta's African dream progressively transforms into a nightmare. It is not the Africa of her dreams that she discovers, but a racist Africa where the Apartheid system transforms the white and black South Africans into wolves, one against another. From her first contact with South Africa, the young lady began to question herself about the injustice in which millions of blacks were living in. At the same time she becomes aware of the massive and invading character of the Apartheid system that was extending its tentacles everywhere.

Despite everything Henrietta refuses to compromise and do like all the other whites. She is pursued at the same time by her close relatives (Gertrude, Carla …) and by the South African police regime that suspects her of connivance with an ANC activist called Cuba Mkize. Eight years after her arrival to South Africa, she barely succeeds to escape the South African police mesh and to return to Geneva where her husband Ian, who also left the country clandestinely, rejoins her.

This autobiographic novel is actually a critical view of a German on the South African society during the 60s, at the apex of the Apartheid system. While building upon his experience of Africa in general, the author expresses in and through this novel, a personal point of view on the "separate development of races". The naive and non-conventional behaviour of Henrietta, the heroine of the novel, allows the reader to understand the mechanisms of racism in South Africa. Infact the questions she asks those like her with regard to the behaviour towards blacks brings to light the fanatical foundations and the banality of Apartheid. The reader of Gercke's novel quickly realizes that it is completely impossible for the black and white communities to lead a separate existence. In the same way, he realizes, in the light of the analysis of the free-lance journalist Neil and Henrietta, that it is completely illusory for the white minority to want to reduce the black majority to silence. Besides, if the blacks submits to the white, it is only in the wait for the right moment to knock him down. Under the ashes of submission of the "bastard blacks" broods the fire of revolt.

This novel presents a white South African community that seems to approve the Apartheid system. It is moreover a system in which the German immigrant Henrietta, finds it difficult to find her marks. Apartheid appears in the light of Gercke's novel as a system of depersonalization wherein the individual looses his identity only to let the dynamic of race to prevail. All those who, like Henrietta, refuse to conform to it, are simply crushed or excluded by the system. However this novel cannot be considered as a Manichean picture of the South African society, for it presents a critic without complaisance of the black and white communities. Gercke's novel however has the merit of raising the abnormality of a regime that few Europeans have dared to denounce. It will be interesting to discover by way of comparative reading the situation of South Africa presented by A. Steward Paton in "Cry the beloved country", by Andre Brink in "Une saison blanche et sèche", by Kateb Yacine in "Un pas en avant, trios pas en arrière" and by Stefanie Gercke in "Mon retour en Afrique". Clearly it is a matter of superimposing these different views on the South African society in order to bring out its complexity.