Entangled in patriarchy: migrants, men and matrifocality after apartheid

In the South African literature on race, nationalism and landscape, considerable attention is given to the theme of the 'empty land'. The novelist JM Coetzee (1988) wrote that the myth of the empty land had been central to the establishment of Afrikaner narratives of ownership and belonging in the South African interior. The argument advanced by Afrikaner nationalists was that when the Afrikaners trekked into the interior from the Cape Colony, they came to occupy land that was largely vacant or empty. For Foster (2008), this shift in land narrative was discernible within Afrikaner circles from the 1920s as intellectuals and politicians moved away from ideas of the land as inhabited or productive to ones that described it as 'empty'.