Pierre-Olivier Sabalot „Piet Meyer, the voice of Afrikanerdom“

2018, Auda Isarn editions, Toulouse, pp. 288

There are works which have been misinterpreted at first sight by us. The above work by our Marseille colleague Pierre-Olivier Sabalot (born in 1970) certainly falls into this category. When this book came out we hesitated to buy it because its subject matter was about a „Jewish“ personality: the name „Meyer“ is a very Jewish name. But the writer Sabalot answered us yesterday: „„ No, Piet Meyer was not Jewish […] Pieter Johannes Meyer comes from an old family of Dutch descent. His most direct ancestor in South Africa is a certain Philippus Jakobus Meyer (whose original name was probably written Meijer, pronouncing the same way), who arrived in Cape Town in 1664, that is only ten years after the founding of the town by Jan van Riebeeck, which makes the Meyers one of the oldest white families in South Africa.The terms Meyer or Meijer comes from the Latin maior („greater than“) and designate, in Middle Dutch and in the dialects Medieval Dutch, a profession, that of „steward.” We also find in Flanders surnames derived in the forms Meyers or De Meyer and in the north of France in the forms Mayeur or Lemayeur […]“(op. cit.pp 26-27, sent to us by e-mail). So with a huge delay of three years we have completed reading this book during some days because its writing is simple.

The beautiful vocation of Piet Meyer is felt from the start: „the student Piet Meyer follows with great interest and curiosity his art history courses which partly complement his attraction to the aesthetics of Greece classic „(op.cit.page 34). We had written an article on the Prophet Nicholas Van Rensburg and we were very happy to read on page 84 that another Van Rensburg was the right-hand man of the „Ox-Cart Sentinel / „ossenwabrandwag“ in afrikaans, the „most important cultural movement of the Afrikaner people „(op.cit.p. 84) between 1938 and 1952, the year of its dissolution. Our Meyer was part of this movement which had 300,000 members at its inception in 1939 and which had „a pro-Nazi commitment“ (op.cit.p.85). The „Volkstaat“ (state of the people) would be on the contrary of the French revolution and its ideals since it was „inspired by the Greek examples, a counter-revolutionary model, in which the civil and political rights are strictly reserved to the citizens resulting from the demos , the organic ethnic community which excludes the metics and the periecs, free men but from other cities „(op.cit.p.94). But we were a little disappointed by the anti-Terreblanche theses on page 188: „the very noisy, very media-oriented, very folkloric and above all very ineffective Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) ... will not have been, in the end, that a maneuver or provocation of power .. (op.cit.page 188) The fact that Eugene Terreblanche was assassinated by the South African secret services in 2010 is a something that cannot go unnoticed. The Apartheid founder Verwoerd „accuses the Jewish state Israel of hostility to separate development“ (apartheid - note to us)“ (op.cit page 169) and „the South African Jewish community of dual allegiance and systematic political support for the black opposition „(op.cit.pp.169-170). Thus we finally located an argument in great demand for years in order to justify the unease we had felt towards this colorful society, not only South African but French or Greek also.

 written by Dionysos Andronis