Who sings the nation state?

If you haven't already heard the rendition of the South African National Anthem currently getting a lot of online attention, listen to the video below. But be warned: your ears may bleed.
I am currently working on a paper on the musical marketing of the upcoming soccer world cup in South Africa, and while this incident isn't directly related, I think I may try to find some way to work it in there. Funny and scary all at once.



Here is the Mail and Guardian report on current responses

A brittle democracy

I got cold shivers when I read this article in the Mail and Guardian about the destruction of a Great Trek memorial in Standerton. How can a country which claims to uphold multi-cultural ideals (I have problems with that ideological construct in the first place, which I will discuss some other time, but it is official policy after all), and bases its international status on notions of acceptance and reconciliation, condone an action like this? In the wake of the De La Rey issue, this is the type of action that is positively calculated to create dissent.

I want so badly to believe that South Africa is headed in a positive direction. I am staking my future, my career, and in many ways even my life, on it. My parents live in South Africa, and my intention is to rejoin them there when I complete this degree. I am building up a career on the belief that cultural practice offers the type of insight into the functioning of society that is necessary for peaceful and ethical coexistence. I really do believe that we are in the best possible position in the world to make that happen, because we are so aware of how easily things can go wrong, and so proud of the opportunity we have to make them go right. But when I read something like this, it makes me fearful, and leaves me feeling very much alone. Without the country I believe in, I'm just an alien, a foreigner in New York and the whole world. There is no place for me to call home, and there is no meaning in the work that I do. I'm not prepared to accept that.

The threat posed to Afrikaner culture is a threat to the foundations of democracy on which South Africa is build, and it is on an equal footing with the destruction of Sophia Town or District Six, or any of the acts of cultural violence perpetrated by the Apartheid government. It creates angry people, bitter people, and people who feel justified in committing acts of violence. No one wants to be evil, but people will do some pretty evil things in the name of self preservation, and making people feel like they have to fight to survive is like setting a table for evil right in the middle of the banquet hall.

I hate what apartheid did. I hate that it made people feel that acts of ruthless vengence like this are justified. And I hate that it has made so many people so angry. But repeating the cycle all over again is not the solution. Apartheid was the result of so many cycles of oppression and vengence that it is probably impossible to trace a root cause. It is, however, possible to break the cycle. But that means making an effort, if not to fully understand every culture (an impossible task), then at least to acknowledge its importance in the lives of some people, and not destroy it for the sake of destruction. Please don't destroy everything we have worked for, and don't dishonor the sacrifices made to get us to where we are. South Africa is worth more than that.

UPDATE:
The Mayor who apparently ordered the damage to the memorial has been issued with a court order to personally pay for the repairs, according to News 24. Read this article here, as well as this one, this one and this one that all pertain to the issue.
On the issue of whose culture gets to be called African, read these News24 articles criticizing Mbeki's reconciliation strategy, discussing the role of Afrikaans in the anti apartheid struggle, and defending government's strategy with regard to Afrikaans

In which the New York Times features

De La Rey made it onto the front page of the New York Times on Tuesday. I have been having a really hard time writing about it (partly because blogger refused to post and then lost the first draft I put together, though I think that that one didn't make it online is probably a good thing). I find it so hard to strike a balance between self-righteousness and utter naïveté on this issue. My advisor really knows what she is talking about when she says I need to read to develop the vocabulary I need to write. But quite honestly, why is it so difficult to write about Afrikaans culture? While I wouldn't put the song up there among my favourites, I quite like it. As enough people have said before, it is a catchy tune. And I do like the strategy of reclaiming a pre-apartheid history for Afrikaans. I do not align myself with a right-wing perspective, though, and recognize the capacity within this piece of music for alignment with causes I think are fundamentally flawed. But how to find the middle-ground....

It seems to me the pivot point is somewhere around the issue of the old South African flag, and most specifically the colour orange. When the new South African flag was chosen, it was stated specifically that the colours had no specific symbolism, aside from their use in some of the many previous flags that had been associated with South Africa. In general, the red, white and blue reference the Union Jack and the old SA flag, while green black and yellow recall various struggle organizations flags, including that of the ANC. The one colour that was excluded was the orange that had formed the lower bar on the old flag. The word "Orange" was also left off the new name for the province formerly known as the "Orange Free State". It was, however, adopted by the residents of Orania, a Northern Cape Afrikaner town with aspirations of independence. And I have vague (and I suspect unconfirmable) memories of orange being associated with a "no" vote during the 1992 referendum that led to the end of Apartheid. Is that too much symbolic weight to put on a single colour? I also have a remembered association between a horrendously violent act filmed and broadcast by the South African media in the 1980s, and the green, yellow and black flags that hid the faces of the perpetrators. What types of violence get demonized or justified by the state, and under what circumstances? The way that colours and flags get handled here, in the US, is very different from the way they are considered in SA, but in experiencing the American consideration of their flag, I think I am beginning to understand not why, but at least how, a flag can become such a contentious issue.

To return to the music, though, I must point out that none of the reports I have linked to yet note that the original statement by the Department of Arts and Culture, which seemed to ignite the already smoldering controversy, was not in fact a spontaneous effusion, but was issued at the request of the Afrikaans magazine Huisgenoot. The issue was then picked up by the FAK (which is where I first encountered it), and then by the national press, including the newspapers I have already linked to. The Blue Bulls Company then allegedly censored the song during rugby matches at Loftus Versveld, and then revoked that decision in the face of public outrage, though the company deny that any official decision along those lines was ever made, and claim that the song was played at last weekend’s match at Loftus.
Now is it just me, or does it begin to look like the controversy is really being fomented among white (I might even go as far as to suggest primarily Afrikaans) commentators? The DAC statement is pretty nonchalant in comparison to the FAK reaction, while the report in the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld, that I translated previously is significantly more agitated and even potentially inflammatory than that issued by the Citizen, or any of the other newspapers I have linked to. The New York Times buys into the ominous pessimism of the Beeld article somewhat more than the equivalent English South African press, but the assumptions made by that article about connections between Afrikaans culture and apartheid (no, they are not the same thing), and the direct connection, almost equation, drawn between De La Rey and Hendrik Verwoerd (most notably by the fronting of the article with a photograph of the diminutive statue of Verwoerd that overlooks Orania) which indicates the lack of subtlety concerning Afrikaans history that is precisely what this song and its popularity seem to be responding to, somewhat undermines the credibility of that report. I would suggest, though, that the noisy enthusiasm with which the Afrikaans community has opened this debate, indicates a strong desire to be heard. Michael Wines, the New York Times journalist, did make at least one strong point when he suggested that Afrikaners are afraid of their culture being “tossed into history's dustbin” (pg. 2) (this may have been an idea culled from the Sunday Independent, but as their articles are only available for perusal by subscribers, I am unable to confirm this). Certainly Afrikaans culture is rarely promoted along with post-apartheid South African culture in a broader sense: it is not exotic enough for either the world music or the international cultural tourism markets and too strongly negatively inflected by international opinion to fit into either pan-African or revisionist, Rainbow Nation rhetoric. And yet, the Afrikaans music industry, in particular, is big in South Africa. However it may look from the outside, contemporary Afrikaans musical culture did not spring spontaneously to life around this song alone. While I can't find stats for Afrikaans music sales right at present (I'm sure they must be out there), I can assure you that the Afrikaans music industry has a significant market, not least because the generational gap that is so evident among many audiences, is negligible among audiences for Afrikaans music. Musicians like Bok, Dozi, Karen Zoid, Chris Chamelion, Steve Hofmeyr, and the list goes no, play to audiences that span age-groups, while Afrikaans music crosses market-defined genre lines like classical, folk, pop, rock, and to a lesser degree, hip hop and jazz. There is no correspondingly strong white English South African industry, not because the music is not out there, but because, I would argue, assimilationist politics, coupled with post-apartheid white guilt and/or exodus created a self-conscious rupture in English South African music, as composers and performers attempted to navigate the opposing boulders of ‘paternalism’ and ‘eurocentrism’ that litter the rivers of postcolonial creativity. Afrikaans culture, from the Voëlvry movement, and beyond, has taken up the challenge, and is encountering the accusations and pitfalls that have kept me fearfully mute.
But New York heard this one. Free speech is a treacherous and ethereal idea, in situations like these.

Follow-up on the De La Rey story

Tim Du Plessis has a much more hopeful take on the De La Rey saga than I have hitherto read. The suggestion that living "in gated suburbs and fortified houses" is tantamount to "inward emigration" is a little annoying. It is difficult to feel engaged in the country when you are constantly on high alert for your basic safety. But I guess I would have to go back to the original source of that idea to really take it up (how I wish journalism followed the same strict referencing standards as academia). In the interim, though, I am prepared to take that as no more than a gesture in the direction of other theorists on the white South African condition, and accept the article as a whole as a useful and positive contribution to a fascinating debate.

Also, here is Jetstreaker's comment on the story, as well as a link, from Jetstreaker, to Bok van Blerk's official website.

Reading some of the information on Bok's website alongside the news articles I have linked to already, I guess the concerns that the department raised were really more about potentially problematic uses of the song by extremists, rather than the song itself, and I have been a bit sidetracked by the latter. The song, as we have been reminded over and over, is not problematic in and of itself. But neither, I rush to add, is a basic Afrikaner solidarity generated around it. The reinvigoration of Afrikaner identity is critical to the future of diversity in South Africa. Claiming South African-ness, South African identity, is how young Afrikaners are going to develop a sense of investment in South Africa and its future. You have to feel proud of your place in South Africa's history in order to build on that for the future, and a sense of pride in a pre-Apartheid South Africa seems like a pretty good starting point, to me.

On the other hand, I do struggle with the whole idea of diversity in the first place, because creating groups, as Henri Tajfel and John Turner have showed, almost inevitably leads to conflict, and the idea of diversity, at least as a political ideology, is premised around the demarcation of difference. Being away from home, and working with people with a whole variety of different experiences from my own is invariably an enriching, and I am beginning to think absolutely necessary part of developing an independent intellectual life and the ability to think creatively and originally. That is very directly tied to notions of diversity. I suspect, though, that the problem resides in the creation of exclusivity, the idea that a culture is only "pure" or authentic when it is performed by what I will refer to as 'original culture bearers'. It is a half-formed idea for me at present, but it responds to my experience of what gets promoted by organizations like UNESCO as Intangible herritage, or by institutions like Carnegie Hall as South African culture (cf. my post on Jeremy Taylor's New York performances. Ag Pleeze Deddy was banned by the Apartheid Government for "mixing languages". Why then was the Graceland collaboration celebrated? (see Louise Meintjes wonderful 1990 article for more info. You need access to Jstor to get it via that link, but if anyone knows of an open-access version, I would be delighted.) Was it just a different historical moment?), or by the whole World Music industry, or even, historically, by the discipline of Ethnomusicology (though this is changing, or has changed, to some degree, at least).
Ok, so that is really just be thinking aloud, and doesn't read particularly easily, but as I intend to work on all of this much more over the next few years, it isn't totally irrelevant.