"Rocking the Boat" in South Africa? Voelvry Music and Afrikaans Anti-Apartheid Social Protest in the 1980s

Abstract

The British social and cultural historian, Arthur Marwick, concluded his magisterial book on the cultural revolution of the 1960s in the West with a very brief final sentence on the transformation: has been nothing quite like it; nothing will be quite the same again.1 This deceptively simple and deliberately vague assertion masks an array of nuanced historical judgments in which Marwick teased out the complexities and contradictions of the sixties. In trying to characterize the decade, American author Hunter Thompson has succinctly formulated the analytical problem inherent in the dynamics of the period: History is hard to know-but even without being sure of history it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time-and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.... You could strike sparks anywhere.2 While there seems to be a firm understanding that the 1960s represent the confluence of meaningful social forces, there are some explanatory doubts as to how and why it happened. The conundrum invites historical analysis; the outlines of the phenomenon may appear clear, but the reasons for that are not immediately apparent nor is its historical significance self-evident.3 In a similar vein Afrikaans anti-apartheid social protest music during the 1980s was reminiscent, albeit in a much more muted form, of the cultural and social challenges to the status quo in the West two decades earlier. Perceptive observers picked up on this. Thus American journalist Tom Masland, who was based in South Africa, reported in mid-1989 on the similarities in dress, lyrics, and general political outlook between the followers of Afrikaans counterculture and what he considered to be their earlier American counterparts.4 The analogy, suggestive as it is, should not however be overdrawn. The South African variant had its own local character and emphases that impacted in a particular manner and generated its own complicated processes and codes of understanding. These need to be untangled and assessed primarily in the context they were moulded. This article has several related aims. It seeks to understand the conditions under which anti-apartheid Afrikaans protest music emerged in the '80s and why it took about twenty years after oppositional youth movements in the West for roughly comparable developments among Afrikaner youth to gain some traction. Central to the protest was an attempt to question, and even to reformulate through the medium of music, what it meant to be an Afrikaner during the latter phases of apartheid. The analysis disaggregates the dynamics and nuances of this process. Moreover, the actual impact of the phenomenon at the time is evaluated through a critical assessment of the claims made by band members and journalists. Finally the way in which the memory of this movement continued to have an influence among young Afrikaner people well into the post-apartheid era is explored. Emergence and Social Background One of the salient features of the tumultuous 1980s in South Africa was the cycle of on-going black protest orchestrated by the United Democratic Front and other extra-parliamentary anti-apartheid organizations and the declaration of successive states of emergencies by the predominantly Afrikaner National Party government. Overtly anti-apartheid Afrikaner voices were relatively mute during this period. However, initiatives such as the meeting between mainly Afrikaner intelligentsia and some of the leaders of the banned African National Congress in Dakar in Senegal in 1987 as well as the appearance of an uncompromisingly critical Afrikaans newspaper, the Vrye Weekblad (Free Weekly) stand out as distinct markers. To this must be added a sprinkling of Afrikaans literary works and some tentative soul searching in some Afrikaner churches about the morality of apartheid. …