Word: crapanzanos
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Hennie is the pseudonym of an outspoken Anglican priest in Wyndal, a pseudonymous white settlement in a lush, isolated valley north of Cape Town. His audience is Vincent Crapanzano, an anthropologist at New York City's Queens College, who assembles in Waiting an oral biography of South Africa's white community, the 16% minority that rules a nation at once divided and single-minded. Over the course of the book, Van der Merwe and more than 30 other Wyndal residents vent their passions, explain their prejudices and in effect deliver their own eulogies. "We lack (tribal ritual) so terribly...
...Cooke's compatriots are so self-critical. Indeed, Crapanzano begins his study by explaining the rift within the white community, which separates the Afrikaners from their neighbors of English descent. So profound is this mutual resentment that many Afrikaners championed Hitler during World War II rather than support what they considered a British cause. Conversely, some English speakers will drive miles out of their way rather than patronize an Afrikaner store...
Despite their differences, however, the two groups share the anxiety of outnumbered usurpers. They dwell in the past, using jargon and jingoism, history and mythology to erect walls around themselves and ward off the unknown. The white South African, contends Crapanzano, exists in a state of suspended animation. His waiting produces "feelings of powerlessness, helplessness . . . and all the rage that these feelings evoke...
...Crapanzano registers both dark rites and white lies with scrupulous calm. Every now and then, he cuts loose with supple analytical turns on the nature of waiting, of being colored or of creating myths of violence. But for the most part, the author is content with a tone of measured outrage. So measured, in fact, that his own misgivings about the South African system are often drowned out by the whites' disarming pleas for sympathy...
Ideal Foils. Jane Kramer, 31, a New Yorker staff writer, got her story by virtually living with Omar and Dawia for six months. She had come to Meknes with her anthropologist husband, Vincent Crapanzano, who was doing field work. In the book the Crapanzanos are thinly disguised as M. and Mme. Hugh, young American writers living near by. As Western pragmatists, they make ideal foils for the other characters. When Khadija vanishes, M. Hugh wants to charge down to the police station to start the wheels of orderly investigation. Having saved face by blaming the calamity on various "invisibles...
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