In this episode of Gallo Vault Sessions we take a look at Gallo Music’s Afrikaans language catalogue, and consider how the sound of whiteness and in particular, Afrikanerdom was a conscious construction by the SABC and by extension, the Broedebond. We will explore how music in particular was used as a means of forming Afrikaner conscience in the wake of the Anglo-Boer war, and how various musicians reacted against the Broedebond’s idea of what it meant to be a “good Afrikaner”.

To help us tell the story we chat with some new voices: musician and music historian, Schalk van der Merwe; critical whiteness studies scholar, Thandiwe Ntshinga; legacy artist, Anton Goosen, and of course Gallo Music’s resident archivist, Rob Allingham.

Gallo Vault Sessions in collaboration with KONJO

You can listen to our specially KONJO curated mix by musician, Abraham Mennen @abrahammennen, tracing his favourite Afrikaans language sounds here.

Talking points: radio bantu, SABC, ordentlikheid, Broedebond, boeremusiek, Die Briels, Anton Goosen, Anglo-Boer war, whiteness, concertina, nostalgia, apartheid, Musiek en Leriek, David de Lange, Nico Carstens, poor whites, The Bats, Voelfry movement, shifty records, Laurika Rauch, Johannes Kerkorrel, Goema, kaapse klopse, Ge Korsten, propaganda 

Guests: Schalk van der Merwe, Thandiwe Ntshinga, Anton Goosen, Rob Allingham.

Narrator: Kineta Kunutu

Writer: Zara Julius @ KONJO

Producer: Zara Julius @ KONJO

Researcher: Zara Julius @ KONJO

Artwork: PR$DNT HONEY

Production support: The Good People 

Follow us on @gallorecordcompany & @k.o.n.j.o

Kineta Kunutu

00:04 Hello and welcome back to GALLO VAULT SESSIONS. A six part podcast series brought to you by Gallo Music, in collaboration with KONJO.

00:13 We are so glad you’ve made it to the third episode of the season.

00:21 In this podcast we chat with artists, label execs, radio veterans and thinkers as we explore the back stories and overlooked tapes from the Gallo Music Vault, and reflect on the ways music shapes culture, and how our culture has been shaped by music.

00:57 This is some of the music we will hear today, including in fact a less known side project of Lucky Dube’s in which he sang Afrikaans.

01:06 In our last episode we heard about the ways the Broedebond weaponized music in the retribalization project of the apartheid regime, and the ways the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio Bantu, placed limit on the way music was segregated and circulated according to race, genre and language.

Rob Allingham

01:23 The commissioning of the Bantu radio system was basically an idea of the Broedebond. That is an absolute fact.

01:32 The reason the Broedebond created this system, it was just part of the master plan about how they were going to build up all this tribal ethnic identity specifically directed as part of the greater ‘divide and rule’ plan to build up ethnic conscious which hopefully was then going to be useful in fomenting ethnic group versus ethnic group conflict.

02:01 You can almost say that it was evil.

Kineta Kunutu

02:09 While we know now how the Broedebond and by extension, the SABC attempted to control the airwaves and retribalization of South Africa’s black communities, we often don't consider how the sound of whiteness and in particular, Afrikanerdom was also constructed.

02:25 And so in this episode we will explore how music in particular was used as a means of forming Afrikaner conscience in the wake of the Anglo-Boer war, and how various musicians reacted against the Broedebond’s idea of what it means to be a “good Afrikaner”.

02:41 To help us tell the story we chat with some new voices: musician and music historian, Schalk van der Merwe; critical whiteness studies scholar, Thandiwe Ntshinga; legacy artist, Anton Goosen, and of course Gallo Music’s resident archivist, Rob Allingham.

02:58 But before we start our story, we have a quick note from our producer.

03:02 It is important to note that much of the contemporary language of the recording industry continues to be influenced by South Africa’s apartheid racial classifications and the South African Broadcasting Corporation policies under the apartheid regime.

03:16 We are aware that some of the language used by the guests in the series is outdated and in some cases pejorative and we see it as our duty to critically unpack these nuanced connections so that we can imagine new language recording industry on the continent.

03:49 It is thought that the word Afrikaner was first used to classify groups of mixed raced ancestry in the Cape Colony; folks of Indonesian, indigenous Khoi, San, Bantu, Dutch, Flemish, French Huguenot, German and Nordic descent.

04:24 The term “Boer” however, typically referred to those settlers who migrated east as nomadic cattle-herders or farmers, and subsequently established the Boer Republics: the Transvaal and the Free State after what we now call ‘the great trek’.

04:57 Even so, in 1899 we saw the outbreak of an Anglo-Boer war, or what some called the South African war, between the Boer Republics and the British colonial forces, both of whom were fighting to obtain control over the region, and its rich mineral reserves.

05:12 While it isn’t a moment in history that many South Africans focus on, it's absolutely essential in understanding the psychology that spawned Afrikaner nationalism, and by extension apartheid and the social and political backdrop for most of the music we explore in this podcast.

05:28 The military tactics of the British were incredibly brutal, with figures such as Lord Kitchener who deployed a scorched earth on all Afrikaans and black owned farms pushing, their inhabitants into segregated concentration camps.

05:55 It was four years before this, that the first commercial recording in Afrikaans was made.

Schalk van de Merwe

06:17 The first records were Afrikaans records that you could buy in South Africa were imported in 1910 which is also the year of Unification.

06:28 And at the time still, among the Afrikaners and the English speaking South Africans or the British after the Boer war, the South African war there was still a lot of tension.

06:38 It was interesting to read the advertisements. I’m paraphrasing but something like “do you want to listen to good music? You don't need to listen to English records anymore. Now I can listen to it in the language that's in the hearts of the Boer”.

Kineta Kunutu

06:53 This is Schalk van der Merwe, musician and research associate at the general linguistic department at Stellenbosch University, who published the book, On Record: Popular Afrikaans Music and Society.

Schalk van de Merwe

07:05 Well I’m Schalk van der Merwe. I started my recording career about twenty five to twenty six years ago, and I’ve done a lot of work within the space of popular Afrikaans music, mainly from the rock periphery looking in at the mainstream. But I was always wondering ‘but how come the pop artist’, how come they are the cultural thought bearers/sparer of Afrikaans culture.

07:27 When we talk about Afrikaans, we must always remember it’s a very diverse linguistic community that reflects the particular history of the Cape. It had its roots in a settler colony, but also in the slave society.

Kineta Kunutu

07:55 The Kaapse Klopse is a cultural and musical tradition that centers around the ministerial festival that takes place on Tweede Nuwe Jaar, the second of January.

08:21 Let's listen to Oom Jaakals, by the Central Malay Choir, a combined choir especially assembled for the Gallotone recordings of the one and two.

Schalk van de Merwe

09:10 So you had a plain tuition of performance of Afrikaans music, and this is also I feel the origin of a lot of recorded Afrikaans music. The first people to start recording Afrikaans were white Afrikaans speakers that had bursaries to study in London, but what they recorded were traditional songs but also hymnals that were less rooted in the music traditions of the Cape, and more rooted in the Western hymnal music that was translated into Afrikaans directly from either English or Dutch.

09:44 Its around that time that you see that a lot of culture ephemera among white Afrikaans speakers, because they are also in a privileged position.

09:52 They have access to the modes of production, that you see a white Afrikaner identity emerging that can be quiet distinguished from what was before, during the first World War when South Africa declared war on Germany as an ally of Britain.

10:07 It angered a lot of Afrikaners that were still scarred by the South African war barely twelve years prior to that, and also the fact that Germany at the time were very sympathetic towards the Boers during the war, so that lead to the formation of the National Party as a break-away nationalistic minded segment of that specific population group.

10:34 So that’s where you start seeing the Afrikaner issue becoming a thing, becoming a political thing. There was quite a relatively small group of intellectuals that start moving away from Dutch and into something that can be differentiated from just being Dutch descent and being something new that’s Afrikaner.

Kineta Kunutu

Antos Stella

11:24 Ethnic radio was completely 100% brought on by the apartheid regime that is known as the South African Broadcasting Corporation. It was a complete apartheid mindset. Let’s just segregate people per vernacular, per tribe, per whatever, so all of these vernacular stations were created, not only because people could speak the language, but is it was because that’s just how South Africa was segregated, so the government understood the people.

Rob Allingham

11:53 As a matter of fact the commissioning of the Bantu radio systems was basically an idea of the Broedebond, that is an absolute fact.

Thandiwe Ntshinga

12:01 So poor whites actually are a big reason why apartheid happened. This was the rehabilitation, this was the upliftment, this was bringing them to standards of whiteness that are acceptable.

12:16 Poor whites have always been around, it’s not like they just came after apartheid.

Kineta Kunutu

12:20 This is Thandiwe Ntshinga, a writer and critical whiteness studies scholar whose work has focused on the rehabilitation projects targeting poor white folk in South Africa both during apartheid and today.

Thandiwe Ntshinga

12:31 The processes of rehabilitation and upliftment were based on these ideas of respectability and there are these social-cultural expectations as the chosen people that they decided that they were when they made themselves Afrikaans.

Schalk van de Merwe

12:49 On the cultural side was at real concerted efforts to construct an Afrikaner nationalist identity to uplift these people out of poverty, that's one of the foundations for apartheid actually

13:00 Protection of white workers, but also a paternalistic hand in educating them on what is good behavior and good culture, acceptable music and what is not.

13:14 So they had terms like “volks vriendelike”, friendly to the fork and “volks vriem”, this is unacceptable. This was really kind of a popular movement; it really brought the white Afrikaans speaking community out of their holes and created spaces where they celebrated being an Afrikaner.

13:33 And they created this iconography and the sonic element , and the visual elements and a lot of cultural – how can I say it, “abracadabra mambo jumbo” was involved – you know, was present in that process.

13:46 And although it wasn't strictly political, the main people that benefited from that was more radical nationals that eventually ten years later won the general election and actually in apartheid.

Kineta Kunutu

13:59 This is where the notion of ordenlikheid – Afrikaans decency – comes to the fore, where the Broedebond and its public face, the FAK (the Afrikaans Cultural Federation) introduce a set of guidelines of what would deem culture of a high standing for the Afrikaner.

Thandiwe Ntshinga

14:13 In that, poor whites become the buffer between black and white. Their performance of whiteness and their performance of Afrikanerness is so incredibly dramatic because they are the ones who’ve had to protect their race, you know.

14:31 As much as they are the threats to whiteness they also have to protect whiteness from the threat of blackness.

Kineta Kunutu

14:37 Rob Allingham…

Rob Allingham

14:38 The reason the Broedebond created this system it was just part of the master plan about how they were going to build up all this tribal ethnic identity with the idea that basically they were going to divide the country, and all these people are going to leave these cities and go to these allegedly independent Bantu stands.

14:57 This was specifically directed as part of the greater ‘divide and rule’ plan to build up ethnic conscience which hopefully was then going to be useful and fomenting ethnic group versus ethnic group conflict.

15:16 You could almost say that was evil, but, it did have this marvelous side effect that it created a market for the record companies to record these “ethnic musicians” to supply music to these radio stations and I mean there was a lot of absolutely fantastic music that came out of it, and there I say also extremely distinctively African music as well.

Kineta Kunutu

15:44 Vastrap was a style of up-tempo Afrikaans music for dancing. Primarily instrumental, vastrap later became lumped into what we now refer to as boeremusiek. .

Schalk van de Merwe

16:47 Its just interesting to see the songs that they omitted and to see the songs that they included, interestingly enough as well a lot of those songs, probably unknowingly were really squarely rooted in labour song traditions and music of the Cape and all that.

17:17 He was played in LM radio like I said (unclear).

Kineta Kunutu

17:35 Throughout his short six year career, David de Lange is said to have sold almost a million records, yet he was still cast away as a so-called embarrassment to the Afrikaner as a poor white mine worker who didn't subscribe to the FAK’s parameters of the ordentilikheid.

Schalk van de Merwe

18:00 The traditions and the origins of boeremusiek really lies with the laborers that worked on the farms, that played music till the farm owners could dance to it on weekends.

18:09 Those kinds of things, but you had these white boeremusiek artists that were working in the mines by day and recording by night. I mean within conservative Afrikaners society they were still debating whether they can have fundraiser for the Afrikaner poor, by hosting dances because you know they were so conservative that they thought it was the same.

18:30 Because nationalism wasn't the only ideology available to Afrikaners during that time, they had socialists as well, you had unionist elements as well, so this was really if you are playing popular music in Afrikaans and it’s not sanctioned, it was not just bad taste it was abomination.

18:51 It goes against this master narrative of a guard ordained place at the home of South Africa, so people took it quite seriously those that objected to it.

Kineta Kunutu

Schalk van de Merwe

19:22 That's when the Schlaage music from continental Europe became imported, and singing about holidays in Venice, or you know, singing about the Fauna and Flora, singing about how beautiful South Africa is.

19:57 And the Googles deliberately made them broadcast light-hearted music in times of war.

Kineta Kunutu

20:05 Yikes!

20:07 Lets listen to a bit of Erika by Gallo musician, Ge Korsten – who clearly influenced by World War II the era German music, had a significant impact on Afrikaans culture.

Schalk van de Merwe

21:07 There's a psychology here that it has no direct relation to South African society and definitely not South African politics.

21:15 But it’s got – its related to the South African landscape in the sense of Tafelberg or Bloubergstrand you know, or Poleganperal. So it’s very much this European sound stuff.

Ron Allingham

22:00 On the other side of the equation you had what people at the time just referred to – this is just Afrikaner music, but in fact what it was, it was American country music altered marginally from an actually music stand point, but obviously you know with Afrikaans lyrics.

Kineta Kunutu

22:31 It is in the early 60s that True Tone gets sold to Eric Gallo.

Rob Allingham

22:36 Many of the most famous songs are just direct translations in Afrikaans of American country songs. You know it was like you know, mother’s dead and daddy’s dying kind of stuff you know.

Kineta Kunutu

22:49 Let’s listen to The Briels’ Trein na Pretoria.

23:43 This song was a translation of Mac Wiseman’s The Eastbound Train, which was initially released on Brunswick, and distributed locally through Gallo.

Rob Allingham

23:52 I can’t give you sales figures. I can only tell you that, if you look at the amount of records that The Briels recorded for True Tone, I mean we are talking about a catalogue that must have ultimately – it’s like several hundred recordings.

24:06 So you know that this stuff was selling by the bucket full and it was never ever played on the SABC. Absolutely forbidden NO-NO-NO, and there was a whole genre of this stuff, even without getting played on the radio the stuff sold by the bloody bucket full.

Schalk van de Merwe

24:24 They were very different to someone like Ge Korsten, Tan Sonny Briel, Sanny was a forklift driver and the husband worked in the mines.

24:34 So they were solid working class Afrikaners, and they would literally go and look at dramatic news events and then write songs about that. So there’s a mine tragedy, they would write songs about the boer miners down the shaft you know, dying.

24:54 Or the poor girl on the train to Pretoria that didn't have any money. It’s like pulling teeth listening to that music, but I find it interesting because it was an antithesis of people singing about a holiday in Venus, these people who haven't ever heard of Venus you know, it was very much out of their cultural perspective.

25:37 So they switched taste, suddenly you see Afrikaners playing golf you know. You got the first generation that goes to University. You have Mercedes dealerships in every small town. You know it’s the (unclear) that kind of thing sells.

25:52 I think it's still like that in many ways. The segregation under drained apartheid was so successful that white South Africans lived on white beaches, white neighborhoods, white schools, they very rarely got a glimpse of the effect of apartheid.

26:08 To a certain degree the majority of Afrikaners at this time are not too concerned about politics because its working for them.

26:29 The critical white voice is still very much in its infancy.

Kineta Kunutu

26:33 In his book, Schalk writes that “it is perhaps for this reason that commercial Afrikaans pop music remained close to the bosom of the state and shows how deeply entrenched Afrikaner nationalism was in the Afrikaans culture industry”.

Schalk van de Merwe

27:02 But also interestingly at a stage some of that boeremusiek became quite jazzy. All the boeremusiek cords are the diminished cords, you know, you don't get normal cords in boeremusiek and that jazz influence into boeremusiek is another different topic and that’s also created a lot of tension within the boeremusiek community.

27:19 And also the SABC wanted to separate traditional boeremusiek from their tune. We didn't like boeremusiek originally but now we see it as a cultural pleasure and we don't like this jazzy stuff.

27:30 People like Mica Carsons who was a jazz virtue hoster he never wanted to be known as a boeremusiek artist, he was beyond that.

27:38 There’s actually an interesting theme, between guys who flipped between jazz and boeremusiek effortlessly, you know it could collaborate and improvise in spaces with Black musicians that suspended the social hierarchy in the constructs outside of that social room.

Kineta Kunutu

27:56 Let’s give Nico Carstens a listen, with his widely popular song Zambezi, where you can really hear the South African jazz influence merged with the boeremusiek accordion, though much of his catalogue was more in line with what would traditional.

Schalk van de Merwe

29:15 And even if it went against the grain of Afrikaners establishment, it does have a sonic quality that people have association with. Being pop artists and selling records didn’t make you political, a lot of them weren’t involved in politics, they weren’t conservative you know.

29:31 They weren’t singers in service of the regime, you know they were just, they had good voices and whatever and they just wanted to make records. Well but if you think about sonic landscapes that then becomes the sound of whiteness, so you don't need explicit lyrics.

29:46 For someone who doesn’t understand Afrikaans, someone whose from you know KwaZulu-Natal, if you are a Zulu and you hear this, it has its own set of meanings and your connections to it. And you connect that with the boere, people of the opposition, the oppressor, whatever you want to call them, so you can’t escape that because it’s very clearly identifiable as the music of this group.

30:09 You know the concertina as an instrument – I’m not talking about the ways its played by a maskhandi musician or Zulu musicians, the Zulu concertina, but the boeremusiek concertina does have a value.

30:21 Its like the lap steel guitar in country music, if you hear that, you can know you’re in the deep south, you kind of automatically hang all sorts of different meaning to that sound and the musicians that are playing it, and the people that listen to that, well the country people, the country people are generally conservative. They know about the republican, trans supporters and their anti-vaccines and you know they think, “oh!” and they eat meat, whatever.

30:45 And maybe that's unfair, but that's how people act as people like associations.

Kineta Kunutu

30:53 Let's take a quick break and hear from a word from our media sponsors: Sowetan and Sowetan Live.

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31:41 Let's get back to the podcast.

31:50 Welcome back to episode three of GALLO VAULT SESSIONS.

31:53 So far we’ve heard a lot about the confines of the FAK mandate in its attempts to raise cultural profile of the working class Afrikaner, and the ways music was a central feature of the cultural construction of Afrikanerdom in South Africa.

32:29 Of course during the 60s, the FAK becomes increasingly suspicious of popular music and the style of the Beetles, Elvis and the Rolling Stones because of rock’n roll’s association with anti-establishment politics and the civil rights movement which clearly posed a threat to the fascism of the apartheid system.

32:50 But influenced by the huge presence of Elvis, white South Africa saw a rise in local rock bands during this era. Whilst majority sang in English, there were a few groups who would sing in both English and Afrikaans.

33:04 A standout name from this era were The Bats, who eventually released their music on Gallo.

33:16 Let’s hear the title track from their Afrikaans album, Weltevrede Stasie which plays on themes of South African rugby and draws in the Afrikaans market, introducing the concertina to the realm of early rock n roll.

33:29 Let's give it a listen.

33:51 It is against this backdrop that our next guest, the esteemed and highly influential Anton Goosen was developing his own musical ear.

Anton Goosen

33:59 I grew up in the Free State and my ouma who was into classical music: violin, cello, piano and played the (unclear) and whatever during the week until her fingers bled, but on Sundays they played jazz.

34:17 Now we talking about the 30s or something of the previous century and that was quite something, listening to jazz on a Sunday.

34:25 And my father came from Kroonstad, his father, his oupa or oupa Goosen was a pastor in the church, so these two families came together. So it’s culturally a very mixed background from ultra Afrikaans patriotism to the little liberal side.

34:40 And growing up in Kroonstad, I started listening to music. There was a Chris Blignaut which will be in the vaults at Gallo. He sang a lot of songs and made social commentary that had a very naughty oomie in a way but very-very popular. But somehow Chris Blignaut; and the writings of Herman Charles Bosman; and then I heard Babdilan, and the three factors together here by standard seven or something, I knew I wanted to do music.

Kineta Kunutu

35:09 Let's listen to Chris Blignaut.

36:15 Chris Blignant also did an Afrikaans rendition of the US country song, Deep in the Heart of Texas with a title Diep in die Heart van die Bosveld (deep in the heart of the bush).

37:16 Many mainstream FAK approved artists like Ge Korsten, were still singing about the local flora and fauna of the country. So to create content, Veede Van der Merwe produced a show that set music against Afrikaans poetry, and also commissioned a new string of songwriters and musicians to write and perform music that would provide a renewal and rejuvenation of Afrikaans music.

37:40 They called it Musiek en Leriek, Music & Lyric.

37:52 More than a political movement, it was a cultural movement that led to a kind of folk and folk-rock revival in the late 70s, early 80s. Along-side Koos Du Plessis, Laurika Rauch, & David Kramer, Anton Goosen was really at the forefront of writing music with lyrical and cultural nuance. Unsurprisingly, the FAK did not approve.

Anton Goosen

38:26 There were like sixteen of my songs involved in the thing, but from there it went to the stage, which was the market theatre and there were eighty people for a week, and then they took this on tour and it became a major national movement – musiek an leriek, and The Star called it the new wave of Afrikaans music which I liked a lot like being into rock and roll a bit.

38:48 For everybody it was a dividing line from The Briels and all those instant hits that they just translated from Europe for commercial reasons, to something more substantial.

39:02 The Boerebond was still in charge and they then had a meeting – not a meeting, a conference at the SABC to have a discussion about this new little baby in Afrikaans. That's another thing the Afrikaner, I mean they trek a way, they form their own churches and they have different groups, and as soon as something happens they must have a symposium about it and discuss it – to death. And that is what happened there. That is just how it is.

Kineta Kunutu

39:30 Let’s listen to Anton Goosen’s song Waterblommetjies, off his album ‘Boy van die Suburbs’ (Boy from the suburbs).

Anton Goosen

40:10 If you listen to the entire song it is people travelling in the Cape and then when they get there they see everything is fucked up. And I compare this to like a biblical figure of three people with the shining star from Bethlehem and then the negativity when they get there.

40:26 Lots of it because this is one of those protest songs that they never knew it was a protest song.

Kineta Kunutu

40:30 At this time, Anton Goosen was a reviewist for the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld, doing the pop columns. He attended the FAK symposium to advocate for this emergent singer songwriter movement.

Anton Goosen

40:53 I pushed for making peace with rock in Afrikaans, and with this seminar that they had, I had to make a speech and I played them examples from Joan Armatrading to Bob Dylan, and said make peace with this.

41:04 And I was quite knowledgeable at that stage about what trends and whatever. And I just made this as an example to them and I said, “make peace with this modern form of music. People singing about how they feel and what is going on around them, the way they see life, etc.”

41:19 And that’s how Joan Armaltrading got into it. They just sat there and listened. They actually organized two people to speak after me with basically the idea to attack me.

41:31 I grew up with Chuck Berry. To be with the father of rock’n roll, I went right through the rolling phase up to today. Rock’n roll back in the 50s in America, was seen as danger. Like communism with danger, it goes against the system. If there are flaws with the system, rock’n roll will point it out and open its mouth and you feel nothing for the establishment.

41:52 So they decided that this has got to be what’s then kept under control, and I broke away from that and we went on our own. A couple of songs got banned, there were very strict rules: no political songs; no reference to political people; no sex.

42:10 So as a writer what I had to do when I wanted to do the protest thing was to be more subtle. Even if it needs to be using things that I knew, the censorship board at the SABC, the internal one wouldn’t understand.

Schalk van de Merwe

42:58 Anton Goosen wrote a lot of songs for a lot of other artists, and Laurika Rauch’s debut album, they had two songs: Atlantis and Bansaville, that Anton Goosen made. And I think that those two songs – I’d like to say are about ‘what did you do to my beautiful Cape Town’.

43:15 It's about the harshest colored kids living on the street. Mpanzaville is another name for Soweto and it says about the ‘groet crocodile’, the great crocodile which was P. W. Botha’s nickname at that time.

Anton Goosen

43:28 James Mpanza was a leader in Soweto. One of the father’s of Soweto and at that stage as well there was a suggestion as well I read about Soweto’s name to be changed to Mpanzaville after this James Mpanza, and I wrote this song about a crocodile that had to be killed.

43:47 So we have this big name of P. W Botha, this crocodile and in the song Mpanzaville, the people killed the crocodile and then they dance and everybody is very-very happy.

43:59 So I wrote a rock song in Afrikaans and Laurika recorded it and everybody was happy because they didn't know what was Mpanza they didn't know anything about it.

Kineta Kunutu

44:09 Let's give a listen to Mpanzaville, written by Anton Goosen for Laurika Rauch on her debut album.

Schalk van de Merwe

44:53 Censorship played a massive role in forcing artists and record companies to rethink possible offensive songs and censorship was really applied very subjectively. I imagine in my mind an oompie with a grey suit listening you know, and if he doesn't like it – they censored gospel music sometimes, they censored Black Beauty just because of the name, it's about the horse.

Kineta Kunutu

45:36 In the wake of Musiek en Liriek, Anton Goosen recorded the album Danzer, which featured a collaboration with Gallo artist Lucky Dube. Surprisingly enough, it was around this time that Richard Siluma and Lucky Dube collaborated on an a satire bubblegum-style project in Afrikaans called Oom Hansie.

46:33 By the mid 80s, the political climate in South Africa shifted drastically, and the country was on fire. There were two states of emergencies: anti-black political violence had escalated significantly and white South African men were continuously conscripted to the Border War in Namibia, Zambia and Angola against the Peoples Liberation Army of Namibia and its allies across Africa and even Cuba.

46:56 Whilst some thrived in that environment, others were left traumatized and Afrikaans popular music remained almost entirely compliant with the regime in support of the war effort. Two of Gallo’s biggest selling artists of all time released albums in honor of the troops.

47:12 Ge Korsten released Huistoe (Homewards) — the cover artwork with a stoic and smiling solder in army fatigues proudly holding an assault rifle, and donning a combat helmet.

47:35 The other artist was Bless Bridges who released Onbekende Veragmal (Unknown Soldier).

48:03 The three main acts of the tour were Berlnodus Niemand, Koos Kombius the writer, and Johannes Kerkorrel, who later signed to Gallo Music.

48:24 Voelfry remains to this day the epitome of white Afrikaans protest music. It was a stark outbreak of alternative Afrikaner identities that not only went against the regime, but also the notions of Afrikaner ordentlikheid and middle-class aspirations, and they were explicitly critical of P.W. Botha’s brand of fascism.

Anton Goosen

48:50 I went to the launch of this thing, and then off they went on this tour which was apparently diabolical to her, and the liberal side of the newspapers were behind it. A lot of us were like behind it, and off they went, basically it was a political thing of ‘Fuck you P.W. and all you people who think like that’ and secondly to have a big party.

49:12 The tour snowballed and created a platform where alternative-minded Afrikaners could meet each other.

Schalk van de Merwe

49:18 And they often played at concerts organized by the End Conscription Campaign which was a movement against deploying white troops in the townships, which happened under the state of emergency in the middle 80s and also end conscription, having to go fight for the apartheid regime when you are, you know, object these ideologies and all that.

49:38 So by performing on these stages, you know they had an opening critical stance.

Anton Goosen

49:43 The forefront movement came ten years after (unclear) and that movement was basically built around Johannes Kerkorrel who was a journalist at that stage, and he wrote protest songs against the government, mostly these uproar P. W stuff.

49:58 He wrote a couple of nice songs, he was like a difficult oke but he wrote a couple of nice songs.

50:03 Hilbrow is one of them.

Kineta Kunutu

51:14 That was Johannes Kerkorrel’s Hilbrow.

Schalk van de Merwe

51:18 A part of the (unclear) movement and the Voelfry was to free the language. The language didn't belong to the oppressor. The language belongs to the people who speak it, and that is what is so nice today especially in the Cape because the language has got diverted into dialects and new words that come in.

Anton Goosen

51:36 The thing about Afrikaans is it’s an African language and it was born here in Africa. It was born probably in – out of protest, it was like a kitchen language that was spoken by the people in the Cape.

51:52 It wasn’t pure Dutch, it wasn’t English etc., so here was this language born in this continent, which I’m very proud of.

Kineta Kunutu

52:04 While they weren’t released on Gallo, it would be a major oversight if we didn’t mention The Genuines – a heavily underrated Cape goema punk band that extended the Cape Klopse music traditions into the voelfry movement!

53:21 In the second half of 1989, P.W. Botha resigned from presidency, F.W. De Klerk succeeded him and the next year Nelson Mandela was released.

53:43 While voelfry reached a peak and fizzled out quickly, it really kicked the door open for a steady stream of Afrikaans rock and punk on the other side of democracy, Karen Zoid, Fokofpolisiekar, Hewels Fantasies, Van Coke Kartel, who all demonstrate a new Afrikaans voice in post apartheid South Africa.

54:04 Of course like everything Afrikanerdom is not a monolith and remains complicated.

Schalk van de Merwe

54:10 Afrikaans kids try to navigate the post apartheid space you know. It’s a balance between historical guilt of the parents generation and then you still privileged but you don’t know which spaces you are welcomed in or not.

54:41 If you look at the SAMA awards every year you get a SAMA award for the biggest seller. And in the last twenty years you can see how many of those biggest sellers were white Afrikaans patriots.

54:51 During the heyday of CD sales, these people would push over two hundred thousand copies per album which is huge in that small market.

55:00 But at the basis of that, the loyal support lies a very big element of fear. That their cultural space is eroding. Pop almost by definition isn’t – you know it doesn’t function in that (unclear) thing, but there’s this authenticity to it that it’s listeners have. That it’s part of their cultural practices and part of their identity, and they fear that if they don’t support that, it will fade away.

Anton Goosen

55:28 It goes with that thing of people still gooi the whole South African flag or wanting to sing the old anthem and etc. and not wanting to move on, and just grabbing onto the past.

Schalk van de Merwe

55:41 Still singing in your khakhi shirt, singing about the plaas or being a boer, that’s very popular now. Still very popular, but that acoustic driven male voice – deep male voice from Pretoria singing about the land. You know and the good old days. There’s a nostalgic element in white acoustic rock.

56:06 What happens when you talk about nostalgia in a post apartheid sense. ‘The good old days’, what does that mean? White Afrikaners constructing a safe relationship with the troubled past, which makes it easier for them to negotiate the present without being overridden with guilt and being incomplacent in Apartheid. I don’t see white privilege, there is also a sonic element in that.

56:31 You can hear what that sounds like. That thought process in Afrikaans pop music. Look on the other hand, nostalgia is a very big ingredient of popular music.

Anton Goosen

56:45 The record companies are not stupid. They are there to make money. Not to promote arts and culture, not at all. Not one of them that I know of, even the good ones. They have centered the Afrikaner, if you really want to get to the Afrikaner, you call up his sentiments and you’ve got him. We’re weird.

Kineta Kunutu

54:17 We hope you have enjoyed taking a deep dive into parts of Gallo Music’s Afrikaans language catalogue, and learning how it both played into and went against the Broederbond’s construction of Afrikaner ordentlikehid and nationalism.

57:27 We know it was a heavy one!

57:30 If you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out On Record by our guest, Schalk van de Merwe.

57:36 In next month’s episode of the podcast, we’ll explore the talent scout and African music producer traditions at Gallo from Griffiths Motsieloa to West Nkosi. And consider the huge impact they had on constructing what we now know as the sound of not just Gallo, but much of South Africa.

57:57 Thank you for listening to the GALLO VAULT SESSIONS, a new podcast series brought to you by Gallo Music in collaboration with KONJO.

58:07 Today’s episode was researched, produced & written by Zara Julius at KONJO, with production support from The Good People & narration by Kineta Kunutu. Our theme music is the song Toitoi by Marumo & you are listening to Kansas City by The Movers.

58:20 Special thanks to Thandiwe Ntshinga, Anton Goosen, Rob Allingham, and of course, Schalk van Der Merwe. You can listen to our specially curated mix by musician, Abraham Mennen, tracing his favourite Afrikaans language sounds.

58:35 You can find a link to that in the show notes and as always, the KONJO mix cloud page. Be sure to subscribe on your favourite podcast app so you never miss and episode, and please also review and give us five stars or however you rate this podcast.

58:50 We’d love to hear from you. Gallo Vault Sessions - a podcast collaboration with KONJO. With new episodes and curated mixes monthly.