The village I come from had limited access to medium wave. Every day, from 6pm, I started fiddling with the radio, going up to the shed at home, positioning the aerial. When the time came, I would be ready.
The rhythmic march of soldiers accompanied by shouts of Amandla! Ngawethu!(Power! To Us!). The sounds of AK-47s and the singing of Hamba Kahle Mkhonto... would confirm that I had indeed found the station. The formal opening, “This is Radio Freedom, the voice of the African National Congress... born of the people into the front line...” would start the day’s programme.
After a brief introduction, the standard update on world news, the global political situation, the growth of the anti-apartheid movement, the struggle in South Africa and Namibia, women’s struggles and similar issues, ANC president Oliver Reginald Tambo would address the nation in exile, diaspora and inside the country.
That is, all of us, those hiding in the street corners of our townships, the barren villages in the back and beyond of South Africa, and include us all in this movement with which we wanted to establish a connection.
Almost 30 years later I connect with those feelings evoked by those solitary and furtive years of listening to this radio station. For me, this was an important rite of passage. Like many others, political or otherwise, these experiences continue to shape the person who continues to evolve, the woman I am today and will be tomorrow.
The banned radio station fed my soul’s yearning for a different voice on the predicament of being a young black South African trapped in what were constructed as reserves for cheap labour.
Every day I had an hour when I learnt not only about being oppressed but, most importantly, the possibility of being a free human being.
The case which has been brought by AfriForum and the Transvaal Agricultural Union against Julius Malema concerning the song Dubul’ iBhunu ( Shoot the Boer) has taken me back so many decades. I am sure I am not alone in this. Many of us have stories that we have consciously or unconsciously buried within us but we nevertheless carry them in every fibre of our being and they mark us in fundamental ways.
We are not prisoners of our history but beneficiaries of past generations that imagined and yearned for freedom. Like those who came before us we also cut our teeth in the streets of South Africa and dived into the unfamiliar waters of trying to change a society. But, first, we had to know that and to name it as such.
As James Baldwin wrote so many decades ago, when the oppressed begin to articulate their oppression, they have taken the first step towards their own liberation. Radio Freedom gave me this immense gift: the opportunity to listen, digest and articulate the character of the South African socio-political conditions.
Regrettably, over time, much of the narrative of political song has become disembodied and truncated. Many of us cannot identify with the use and abuse of these songs and slogans today.
Today, a song originating from black youth expressing pain and resolve to go away, appealing to their mothers to let them go, be trained and bring bazookas to free their land and people, has been reduced to a single line, Dubul’ iBhunu ( Shoot the Boer).
This line may be the most controversial and newsworthy but this distorts the song, its meaning, context and content. The focus on one line has undermined its essence. The resolve, the cry and the plea of the black youth to his mother, we mama ndiyeke(oh mama let me go) has been totally erased in the public discourse. We do not see their words, we do not hear their voices nor do we experience their pain.
Frankly, there is nothing new here. History is often recorded from the voice of the powerful and the hegemonic paradigm. Those who are on the margins and the subaltern do not form part of this. But the ANC could have tried to bring their voices into court and centred their experience in the proceedings so no matter how uncomfortable many may feel, we are forced to see and connect with their experiences. We must ask how the song of youth willing to leave everything they know to go to foreign, unknown countries becomes a song about killing alone. How did we get to this point where the pain of the black youth and their willingness to sacrifice their lives becomes a song about the fear of white people, especially Afrikaners?
Is this shift in focus and simultaneous erasure of voices accidental?
As for Dubul’ ibhunu, this is part of a chorus and a refrain in the song. One does not require musicologists to explain that this is not necessarily the central part of the song, even more so in many African musical traditions.
Of course, these issues were not raised in court. Important as the Equality Court is in this case, it can only work within the mandate of that institution.
Long after the judgment has been made, these questions of voice and history in the present will remain with us.
However, we cannot expect to address questions of our complex historical heritage in this polarised manner. Our past lives in the present, no matter how hard we try to deny this. Similarly, the parts of our past with which we are no longer comfortable cannot be easily sanitised, nor can we easily throw them away because they are no longer convenient. History is an untidy, inconsistent companion. It is with us all the time, but with all its complexity, meanings by no means settled.
Songs, buildings, poems, symbols are as much part of who we are as a people as our individual DNA. There is no escaping the social and historical construction that has shaped us. And yet, we can choose what to make of it and how to take it into the present and the future.
Songs are also about context. I cannot imagine a family procession to exhantini(the entrance of the kraal, where ancestral spirits are addressed) singing somagwaza, ndakugwza ngalo mkhonto. That is a song sung during the initiation of young men, when the celebrants tease each other about the power of their spear. To sing it at a time when one wants to intercede with the ancestors would be mindless, disrespectful and blasphemous.
Similarly, during the Christian Holy Week (the week preceding Good Friday) I cannot imagine an Anglican congregation singing songs of the Advent. Similarly, one does not sing a funeral song at a wedding or at a baptism.
This is an area the ANC leadership might want to reflect on. The legitimacy of the song as part of our Struggle heritage is not an issue for many South Africans including, I suspect, those who may be sympathetic to AfriForum.
The ANC would help greatly if it marshalled a different line of defence to directly confront these difficult issues.
Unfortunately, both sides in the case have fallen into the dangerous trap, debating whether the song is hate speech or not. Hate speech? But that is for another day. Regrettably, the polarisation of the song (albeit in a distorted fashion) has robbed us of a rich, textured and, yes, untidy narrative of our history, including that of those who come from AfriForum. Consequently, many of us cannot help finding it difficult to associate with such simplistic arguments, irrespective of the quarters from which they come. Yes, simplistic because in many ways the very political and jurisprudential edifice upon which this case is built limits human experience.
Even after these many years, Nazim Hikmet’s collection of poems, I Would Softly Tell My Love, hits me as powerfully as the songs I sang and danced to in the streets.
You’re a mountain village
in Anatolia,
You are my city,
the most beautiful and most unhappy
You’re a cry for help – I mean you are my country;
the footsteps running towards you are mine
So wrote Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish political prisoner upon whom a multitude of indignities and torture was visited. He defied the limiting walls of prison. In jail in Turkey part of his defiance was in the form of poetry, and he wrote subversive poems about the sky, desire, breathing fresh air and love.
Hikmet’s collection is as powerful as many revolutionary, political and non-political songs and poetry of South Africa and many others. From Winston Mankunku’s dirge Yakhal’inkomo(The Ox Bellows), Billie Holiday’s moody rendition of Strange Fruit, (about the lynched black man in the Deep South, US), Tiyo Soga’s Lizalis’isidinga lakho(Fulfil thy promise, oh God of truth), Wally Serote’s poem City Johannesburg and the slow movements of Yoruba Apala music, my hair stands on end.
Song appropriately located and used nourishes and empowers the oppressed.
n Gasa is a researcher and analyst on gender, politics and cultural issues.