JACKET NOTES | Herman Lategan ruffled conservative feathers in his best-selling book ‘Son of a Whore’

Navigating the stigma of an unwed mother ostracised by her own tribe and the church, he captures life in the seedier side of Cape Town

18 February 2024 - 00:00 By Herman Lategan
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Herman Lategan's controversial memoir, translated from Afrikaans to English, was a huge success.
Herman Lategan's controversial memoir, translated from Afrikaans to English, was a huge success.
Image: Supplied

You will be surprised, as I am, naively, at how different the Afrikaans reading market is from the English one. The latter is broad-minded. My memoir, Son of a Whore, originally appeared in Afrikaans as Hoerkind.

I was astonished by the conservative backlash from certain Afrikaans readers, even though the book was a runaway success. One would have thought that by now most Afrikaners would have emerged from the chains of banal parochialism and the suffocating clutches of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Evidently not. They took umbrage to the word hoer (whore), not because they are woke, but because of the faux hypocrisy that still poisons the psyche of so many of my tribe. I was told by many readers that when they purchased the book, some cretin would peep over their shoulder and make moralistic judgments.

There was also a sold-out play produced by theatre-maker, Margit Meyer-Rödenbeck, which toured many venues. I saw with my own eyes how some people stormed out as soon as my character started swearing.

Not to mention the flak I received at certain Afrikaans book talks, with the smell of mothballs hanging in the air. I was casually profaning and had frank opinions of the Dutch Reformed Church. One haughty, moralistic grandee even opened a talk by warning me not to bash the church. Of course, the title is mentioned with wide eyes, as if I’ve just handed over Satan’s head to a nun.

'Son of a Whore' by Herman Lategan.
'Son of a Whore' by Herman Lategan.
Image: Supplied

Oh, the irony, because that is exactly what I was called as a child, a hoerkind (child of a whore), by none other than religious Afrikaners, and of course that bastion of moral fortitude, the Dutch Reformed Church, who refused to baptise me. Thank heavens for small mercies.

Why did they call my mother a slut? I was born out of wedlock during the swinging sixties. My mother had to endure these snarls, and so did I, right into my late teens.

In many ways, my book is a tribute to her solid bravery and her coterie of equally strong female friends who took a little ashamed boy by the hand and showed him that ons is nie almal so nie (we are not all like that).

The memoir takes you through the seedy boarding houses of the 1960s and 1970s in Kloof Street, Cape Town, where I was originally raised. You meet a mix of melancholic drag queens, broken single people whose faces were grief-stricken, and jolly hippies who danced to The Midnight Special by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Later, we lived in Sea Point, where my mother and her entourage exposed me to a cosmopolitan world far removed from the conservatism in most white suburbs. Let me not divulge too much. The columnist, Chris Roper, wrote that my memoir is also “the biography of a city”.

I translated the book into English myself and felt the difference in my heart at once. With the Afrikaans, I had a dominee peeping over my shoulder — with the English, my hippie mother.

Son of a Whore by Herman Lategan is published by Penguin.


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