Red Dog is an ambitious hybrid of a book. It was published in South Africa to wide acclaim in 2014 and has been expertly translated by Michiel Heyns, who has retained the cadence and some of the vocabulary of the original Afrikaans — the mongrel tongue that evolved in the Dutch East India Company’s Cape colony.
Willem Anker brings South Africa’s bloody birth to life through the story of Coenraad de Buys. The priapic founding father of a nation of bastards, he is a pillager and survivor, a rapist and husband, a colonist and outlaw, a rebel and hero. With his numerous wives and children, he is the gargantuan progenitor at the centre of this sprawling tale, pushing those with whom his life intersects — his intimates and his enemies — to the periphery.
The novel is set on the porous borders of the Cape colony at the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries. This period, in which Europe was convulsed by revolutionary change, saw the rapid switching of colonial powers — Dutch, French and English — at the Cape, and Anker describes the dark twinning of freedom and power that lies at the heart of modernity and the colonial project:
News from Europe is slow coming to the Cape… but seditious ideas from France make landfall here faster than any new dress patterns. The words liberté, égalité and fraternité are insubstantial and vague enough to fly over at speed. In Paris, the citizens storm the Bastille in the name of liberty, and on the eastern frontier there’s nothing left but liberty. Indeed, as is always the case with messages that have to travel too far, the French slogans have a totally different look when they arrive, scurvy-ridden and scuffed, in Graaf Rijnet.
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