Kings of the Water [Paperback]

One of the greatest casualties emerging at the end of Apartheid in the early nineties were those Afrikaaners who were unable to make the adjustments to the new way of life in South Africa. Many of these old families stubbornly clung to their farms in the hope that an ANC-led government would not think of seizing their holdings. How wrong they were! In this well-crafted novel, Mark Behr, a South African writer, describes one such family, the Steyns, as they struggle to stay together in a society that no longer espouses their ethnocentric values. This is a new South Africa which, at the dawn of the 21st century, is prepared to right a lot of injustices in relation to who is entitled to hold the land. The story starts with Michiel, one of the disenchanted sons, returning home, after a fifteen-year hiatus, to bury his mother. Michiel had left a bitter and troubled man who could not fit into the rigid moral expectations of the Afrikaan world. There are suspicious incidents involving role models who failed him at critical junctures in his young life. When he returns from the American west coast, he is a liberated man with a changed sexual orientation and whole new set of transformed political and social views. While he m found himself, the family he has returned to is mired in fear, uncertainty, disillusionment, and weariness. It is still a male-dominated realm where women are meant to kowtow to the needs of their husbands. But as Michiel quickly learns, this philosophy is slowly changing as Afrikaan women are becoming more assertive and independent. It is the womanfolk, like his late-departed mother, who are demanding more of a say in the running of the farms like Paradys and the revenue that goes with them. What was once a well-secured holding of a male-dominated community has now become a losing proposition, with few able bodies left to tend it. The story of the decline of the Steyn name is a perplexing one that parallels the insidious disappearance of the Afrikaan heritage over the last three decades. Everyone knows that it will eventually happen but nobody has the means to stop it. Even the language and customs are stuck in the rural past of old, decrepid lifestyle. The very title of this novel mocks what is left of a once proud way of life. While the Afrikaaners were once esteemed kings of the land, they have been reduced to mere kings of the water, which we know does not exist in great abundance anywhere in the veldt region of South Africa. As Michiel leaves to return to America, international forces seem to conpsire to keep him from abandoning his homeland once again. Perhaps, Michiel has now reached a new level of understanding as to how vulnerable his family really as to want to reach out to them with forgiveness for theier slights of the past. It won't be easy as the surviving memebers of this clan sort through their own difficulties.