Fear, haunting, and the (un)making of borders in Eugène Marais’s “Die huis van die vier winde”

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In this article, I bring “Die huis van die vier winde” (The house of the four winds), an uncanny Afrikaans short story written by Eugène Marais and published in 1927, into conversation with Gordonian hauntology and affect theory in order to examine whether, and in what ways, it gives notice of the ever-looming spectre of settler colonial violence in South Africa and its far-reaching implications. I explore how this is a haunting that is made manifest through ghosts born from violence enacted by Afrikaners upon Black people over land ownership and property. In the story, the narrator creates distinct affective atmospheres that associate the outside space with haunting, B/blackness, and fear. On the other hand, the inside space of the home is associated with Afrikanerdom, whiteness, and safety. This distinction constructs and maintains a (false) border between the white Afrikaner self and the imagined, feared Black other, but it is also its unmaking. The Afrikaner characters in the story are forced to reckon with the phantoms that proceed from and are precipitated by the violence of constructing such borders that circulate B/blackness as an object of fear against which the Afrikaner must be protected. I argue that the story critiques and cautions against the outcomes of racial segregation, while shedding light on the preceding history of warfare and forcible displacement that shaped and influenced this segregation.

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