The thing was, new neighbours had moved in next door not long back. The Bellville plates on the car had disturbed her initially, and the fact that it was yet further evidence of the neighbourhood "whitening". Everywhere in her street, it seemed, the black neighbours were leaving, and the new paler ones straight away erected electric wires on top of their regulation picket fences, installed killer dogs and jail bars, and hid themselves from sight. She wouldn't know them if she met them across the road in Pick 'n Pay. She missed the old sense of community, of borrowed sugar and shared skinder, even the out-of-tune hymns from house church, the taxis parking the road full and the parties with distorted sound when John came back from sea.
Staggering out of the house with a new year's babelas, the Cow had decided that the hangover gods would only be propitiated through a gentle day at home, chilling in the glorious summer weather, and a chance - at last! - to get stuck into In Stede van die Liefde. Which she was just doing, when snatches of the conversation from next door clubbed her over the head.
Next door were visitors with upcountry plates. Elgin or Grabouw, clearly farmers by their conversation... but what disturbed her were the frequent crude racial terms which peppered their anecdotes. She couldn't believe that people still openly used words like houtkop and hotnot, and subscribed to the prejudices embodied within those.
She wasn't sure, at first, that she'd heard correctly. But, sadly, she had.
At first angry, she considered confronting them. But a heated argument with drunk farmers didn't seem wise in her delicate state. A complaint to the Human Rights Commission? It seemed a bit out of proportion wasting important people's time on something so trivial. Her personal dignity hadn't been compromised, merely that of the collectivity of humankind. A quiet word with the neighbours later? Hmm - it was unclear where they stood on the issue, they were out with the children when the conversation took place, so they _might_ be on the side of the angels. Equally, they might not. What if she discovered she lived next door to unreconstructed racists? She'd need a Plan B before embarking on that course of action.
Meantime, she was grateful the neighbours behind were out, and that their black houseguests were Congolese and thus unlikely to understand.
What really disturbed her, she explained to Gramsci, was the knee-jerk reaction it provoked in her. Faced with racist evidence in the behaviour of a couple of white Afrikaans speaking farmers from upcountry, her psyche shrilled at Afrikaners, and Afrikaans, and further reading of In Stede van die Liefde became difficult.
Perhaps it was the result of having a Dutch grandmother - the Dutch being big on reclaiming land and stuff, even though it was never theirs to begin with - but the Cow felt the need to reclaim Die Taal from the racists. Biting back herbabelas, she cranked up the volume and sang along tunelessly to Volksbesit 2. The visitors next door shifted indoors.
Dancing around to Laat Staan Sulke Dinge, Laat Staan, the Cow felt the peace return to the neighbourhood. Picking up the neglected novel, she settled back happily in the cooling twilight. Any language that could produce lyrics as poetic as Koos Dup's (below), literature as quenching as Toorberg, or exchanges as dynamic as those overheard any day on the Parade, shouldn't be made to bear the shame generated by a small section of its native speakers.
And as for the visitors, well, sooner or later they'd be obliged to join this millennium. Or emigrate to Orania...