Renegotiating the land covenant in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf

Locating Marlene van Niekerk's novel, Triomf, within a tradition of female responses to the plaasroman, I explore how she uses her novel set on the verge of the 1994 elections to rethink Afrikaners' relationship with the land. Concentrating on the gendering of relation to the land while attending to intersections of race, gender and class, I analyse her critiques of covenant ideology and mechanised concepts of nature as relations to the land that sanction domination. Invoking Aldo Leopold's concept of a land community, I argue that Van Niekerk points the way to a new land covenant that includes men, women, non-human animals and land as part of an interrelated community. Based on ideals of community, this new land covenant respects difference rather than trying to order it into a hierarchy, and thus it paves the way for a re-imagining of Afrikaner identity for a changing South Africa.