MOFFIE – The word he feared most

By Greg Carvellas and André Carl van der Merwe

When André Carl van der Merwe wrote Moffie, it wasn’t for anyone else. The book, drawn from diaries he kept during his compulsory military service in apartheid South Africa, was a private reckoning. A way to unpack a time he and his friends had spent decades refusing to speak about.

“I carried those diaries around for twenty years,” he told me over the phone. “Two suitcases. I never opened them. None of us ever talked about what we went through. It was like we’d made an unspoken pact of silence.”

But when he finally opened them, the pages came fast. Painful, yes. But also cathartic. The result was Moffie, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young gay conscript navigating the brutality, violence, and enforced masculinity of the South African Defence Force in the 1980s. Published in 2006, the book has since taken on a life André never anticipated.

“It’s strange,” he said. “I never imagined it would go this far.”

Moffie has now been brought to life in three powerful forms: first as a contemporary dance piece, then as an internationally acclaimed feature film, and most recently, as a one-person stage play. The stage production—running at the Baxter Theatre—had its world premiere in London in 2024, where it received resounding critical acclaim. It is now being performed in South Africa for the first time. Both the film and this theatrical version were produced by Eric Abraham, the Academy Award–winning producer, philanthropist, and founding producer of the Fugard Theatre, who has championed Moffie’s journey from page to screen and now, to the stage.

“Actually, the first time Moffie was adapted was for the Grahamstown Festival,” André said. “Bailey Snyman choreographed it. Standard Bank sponsored it. It was beautifully done, visceral in a different way.”

The 2019 film, directed by Oliver Hermanus, was a landmark. Quiet, elegant, and deeply unsettling, it captured the suffocating silences of André’s world in long, considered frames.

“The movie is very good,” André said. “But it’s a film. It had to condense, choose, streamline. There’s only so much ground you can cover. The stage version, though, is much closer to my actual words. Much closer to the emotional truth.”

The current production, starring David Viviers, tells the story through a single actor. One voice. One body. No ensemble, no cutaways, no diversions. Just a man and his memories.

“It’s raw. Brutally intimate. Watching it was like watching myself go through everything again. I walked out wondering why it hit me so hard. And then I realised, it was because it was so close to what I lived.”

The title Moffie is not casual. It’s a slur, spat out with shame and menace. A word designed to make you small.

“I feared that word more than anything growing up,” André said. “If you’d told me back then that I’d one day write a book called Moffie, and that it would become a film, a dance piece, and a play, it would’ve been unthinkable.”

But claiming the word, placing it front and center, was part of the reckoning. Part of refusing silence. Even now, seeing it performed doesn’t come easily.

“It’s surreal. Completely surreal. And still emotional. The play, especially, doesn’t let you look away.”

André is careful not to generalise what military service meant for every conscript. The South African Defence Force was enormous, and experience varied widely.

“Where you were posted, who you were with, what your job was—it all mattered. I have gay friends who loved their time there. My second year, I got myself into the media centre at Danie Theron Kryg Skool. That was actually enjoyable.”

That nuance matters. Moffie is not about painting with broad strokes. It’s about shame, survival, silence—and how those things coexist with moments of calm or even joy.

Both the film and the play, André believes, make space for that complexity. But the theatre offers something different.

“There’s no escape in a theatre. You sit there. You feel it in your body. It’s unfiltered. It’s happening in front of you. That’s why theatre is still such a potent vehicle for stories like this.”

Many South Africans, especially white men of André’s generation, still don’t speak openly about the psychological damage left by the Border War. For some, national service is remembered fondly. For others, it left scars they never learned to name. Moffie offers a space to start that conversation, however uncomfortable.

“Any art form that’s honest can help,” he said. “But theatre makes you look. And feel.”

There’s a belief, especially among younger audiences, that Moffie belongs to the past. André doesn’t agree.

“There’s still so much homophobia,” he said. “People think we’ve moved on, but that’s a luxury of certain cities, certain circles. We live in a bubble here in Cape Town. That’s not the global reality.”

He pointed to Ward 22, the psychiatric unit where gay conscripts were sometimes sent for “treatment.”

“Most young people today have never heard of it. They don’t know that history, or how damaging that kind of discrimination was. And still is.”

Which is why he continues to engage with each new version of the work. Why he watches. Why he speaks. Even when it hurts.

“I want people to understand how difficult it was. I want young queer South Africans to know we didn’t always have this freedom. And that it’s not guaranteed.”

When I asked him what he would say directly to someone watching Moffie on stage tonight, he didn’t hesitate.

“I’d remind them that survival isn’t just about getting through. It’s about being seen. That’s what this story is for.”

André doesn’t consider himself an activist. He didn’t set out to become a voice for a generation. He just wrote what he couldn’t keep inside any longer. That the work has taken on a life of its own still surprises him.

“If Moffie has helped even one person feel less alone, then that’s more than I ever expected.”

He isn’t precious about how it’s adapted. But he is moved by the sincerity with which each version is made. Dance, film, and now theatre—they’ve all taken the story somewhere new and, in doing so, kept it alive.

“I didn’t write it for applause. I wrote it because I had to. And maybe, in some small way, it’s done what it was meant to do.”

As the lights rise on a single figure standing alone in front of an audience, speaking André’s words, the story continues. Not as nostalgia, and not as a warning. 

As memory. As witness. As survival, spoken out loud.