'I write because I can't speak'

A film of her book about South Africa's truth and reconciliation hearings has made Antjie Krog a celebrity. She tells Rory Carroll about racism - and being played by Juliette Binoche

There was a time when Hollywood turned to Afrikaners for its villains - the big, fleshy racists audiences loved to loathe. But that was before Antjie Krog, journalist and poet, chronicler of apartheid and the new South Africa, and coming soon to the big screen as a glamorous heroine. Sunk into an armchair in a Johannesburg hotel, she seems slightly dazed by her sudden celebrity and laments her lack of vocabulary to make sense of it. "It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt."

Her book on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country Of My Skull, a semi-fictionalised memoir of her experiences covering the commission hearings, has been made into a film with Juliette Binoche playing a character based on Krog. Binoche has reportedly struggled to emulate her clipped accent and soft voice.

Since publishing Country Of My Skull, in 1998, Krog's has been a voice in great demand. Subtitled Guilt, Sorrow And The Limits Of Forgiveness In The New South Africa, the book documented her years covering the commission as a radio reporter for South Africa's public broadcaster, SABC. Set up in 1995 to record atrocities committed during apartheid, the commission took evidence from 2,000 people and received 8,000 applications for amnesty in a series of cathartic hearings that laid bare a nation's trauma: the security agents who tortured and raped, the black youths who stabbed and burned, the mothers who waited in vain for vanished sons to return.

A mix of reportage and memoir, witness testimony and fictional conversations, Krog's narrative was no less easy to read for its fluid, fluent style. "I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, because people don't think in full, clear sentences," she says. A multiple award-winner, included in Africa's 100 best books of the 20th century, Country Of My Skull turned a respected but little-known poet into a literary sensation.

Notwithstanding her discomfort with the spoken word, Krog is happy to talk about the film, her new book about post-apartheid South Africa and why complacent Europeans annoy her so much and are in for a rude shock.

She is dressed in a sleeveless denim shirt, blue slacks and sandals. Silver rings and bracelets are her only adornment: the nails are unpainted, greying auburn hair sweeps around a tanned, handsome face, the world inspected through rimless spectacles. Born in 1952 on a farm in the Free State province, deep in Afrikaner country, Krog's was a precocious talent.

The sexual and political slant of her poems published in the school annual prompted protests from some parents and teachers.

While teaching at a black teacher-training college she published 12 books in Afrikaans, mostly poetry, before moving into journalism. She writes between juggling the demands of a husband and two children. For her writing is an almost sensual process. "The white of the paper, the size of the paper, the texture of the pencil, the rubber," she sighs, eyes closing at the thought.

Krog was surprised when another writer, Ann Peacock, asked permission to turn Country Of My Skull into a screenplay. "I said there was no story unless you wanted to make it a documentary." But Peacock sold the idea to the Wicklow-based director John Boorman, maker of Excalibur and The General, and the producers Robert Chartoff (Rocky, Raging Bull) and Mike Medavoy (The Thin Red Line).

Samuel Jackson plays a Washington Post reporter sent to cover the commission. He ends up confronting apartheid's horrors as well as his own demons while falling for the Afrikaner poet who covers the hearings for radio, a character named Anna Malan who is loosely based on Krog.

The real Krog seems remarkably laid back about the film. She expects the book to be sexed up but has no idea if there will be a happy ending, car chases or sex scenes. "I think it will be highly interesting to see what comes out of it." When Boorman and Binoche visited Krog's Cape Town home they drank tea and discussed trees. Was she nervous? She laughs. "Of course I was." The French actress was "unbelievably beautiful . . . so beautiful you can't concentrate on what she's saying".

While filming in Cape Town earlier this year, Boorman said the film could have as great an impact as the commission. Meantime, the gossip among South Africa's actors, still smarting about Michael Caine and Sidney Poitier bagging the roles of F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela in another film, is that Binoche is the latest outsider to mangle the Afrikaner accent.

Of greater concern to Krog is her new book, A Change Of Tongue, her first full-length work of non-fiction in English since Country Of My Skull. Tracing the trauma and humour of a decade of change, it delves into South Africa's food, landscape and memories, a mix of anecdote and reportage populated with her relatives, ANC councillors, Boer farmers and assorted characters met on return visits to Krog's home town of Kroonstad.

In these days of nation-building the title refers to more than the English language eclipsing Afrikaans, she says. "You have to sound different, you have to speak differently, you have to see differently." Her son translated the book, which she wrote in Afrikaans, into "neutral" English before Krog refined it. Critics complain that jumbling fiction with fact, blurring the real with the imagined - a technique Krog shares with other South African authors - hobbles their striving for truth.

Krog acknowledges that South Africa has trouble telling the truth. "Why do we all need to sow this confusion? Is it because when we see things happening we're not sure what is true because it's a new country and we're not sufficiently long enough in it to read the codes?" Racism in the rainbow nation is different these days, she says: "Now you think someone is not a human being but you have to call him sir. I'm interested in that kind of confrontation, the way people try to find new answers for old racist perceptions."

Krog praises the ruling ANC for stabilising the economy, among other things, but says that many whites initially inspired by the first democratic election, in 1994, have become "reborn racists" as they see rural infrastructure rotting. "If we don't save the towns we'll become like the rest of Africa, where people just stream into the cities."

Faulting whites for failing to empathise with the poor and to actively build a new society, her book quotes blacks who resent never having been asked whether they wanted to share South Africa with whites. They credit Robert Mugabe with at least giving black Africans the impression of having a choice in the matter.

"If the lives of the poorest of the poor do not change, the whites will get the blame. And we will not be able to refute that," says Krog, softly banging two fists together. A slide into Zimbabwe-style chaos is possible but not likely, she implies, because Mandela's legacy of reaching out is rooted in South Africans. "I can't ever see people throwing that away. He is our best face, so we would want to have that face for ever."

Krog laughs readily and has a coquettish way of framing her face with her hand. Something she hates, she says, dropping the hand, is the visitors to Cape Town who drive past the slums to the affluent suburbs and lecture whites on inequality. Yes, the inequality is a disgrace, but in this globalised world we all share responsibility for squalor in, say, Delhi. "When I put my feet down at Heathrow I see people who 'have'. They are the haves. And if you don't change your mind, your opinions, your wallet, the poor will come for you."

Western Europe is becoming like South Africa, a magnet for the increasingly mobile poor, she says. Should third-generation Turks in Amsterdam be forced to learn Dutch, should those clinging beneath the Eurostar be turned back at Waterloo? Such questions, she says, become trickier as immigrant numbers rise. And for once the Afrikaners, at least those reconciled to living among a majority black culture, are ahead of the game.

European left-wing sympathies indulged in abstract, in comfort, are about to be tested - and the spectacle may not be pretty, says Krog. "Europeans find their essence being confronted, and they don't really know at this stage how to deal with it. It's easy not to be a racist in London, because whites are in the majority. What do they adapt to? A few black faces to be nice to on the tube."

Country Of My Skull is published by Vintage; the film is due out in the autumn