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Abstract
Scholars of black South African popular music have established important connections between music and society. Lara Allen’s studies of pennywhistle-kwela, Christopher Ballantine’s research on marabi and African jazz/mbaqanga,and David Coplan’s social history of black city music, among others, have underwritten the new literature in South African musicology and cultural studies. Previous neglect of black popular culture has made oral testimony crucial to the writing of these musical pasts. Recent investigations in the field, which are preoccupied with the articulation of black struggle to music, and the expression of struggle through music, have adopted a more popular format. Within these, the autobiographies of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela are integral, as is Lee Hirsch’s documentary film, Amandla!. The popularity of these studies and their subjects, and their foregrounded debt to oral testimony and veneration of ‘the Struggle’ has tended to foreclose scrutiny of their representational politics. This article questions whether their homological substitution of music and musicians for anti-apartheid struggles in a postapartheid South Africa enables the radical stories they would tell of that past.
Acknowledgements
This article is culled from my Master's dissertation, written 2004–06 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Christopher Ballantine for his guidance and support during (and after) this period. I would also like to thank my two anonymous readers for their insightful comments and recommendations. Funding for the project was provided by the National Research Foundation and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (2004–2006).
Notes
1 Or Bloemfontein, where the party was founded on 8 January 1912 and where the centenary was recently celebrated.
2 Makeba and Hall, Makeba: My Story.
3 Makeba and Mwamuka, Makeba: The Miriam Makeba Story. Further references in text.
4 Masekela and Cheers, Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela. Further references in text.
5 Dalamba, “Writing Against Exile” and “Storing and Storying Lives.”
6 Hirsch, Amandla! Further references in text.
7 Coullie, “The Power to Name the Real”; Nuttall, “Reading and Recognition in Three South African Women's Autobiographies”; Nuttall and Michael, “Autobiographical Acts.”
8 Nuttall and Michael, “Autobiographical Acts,” 306.
9 Biddle, “Of Mice and Dogs: Music, Gender, and Sexuality,” 224.
10 Ibid., 224–6. My emphases.
11 Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue; Matshikiza, Chocolates for My Wife.
12 Modisane, Blame me on History.
13 Israel, South African Political Exile, 1–2.
14 Bernstein, The Rift; Israel, South African Political Exile.
15 Israel, South African Political Exile, 18; 42.
16 Ibid., 24–5.
17 Ibid., 30.
18 Bernstein, The Rift, 23; Israel, South African Political Exile, 30.
19 Israel, South African Political Exile, 54.
20 Bernstein, The Rift.
21 Ballantine, “Gender, Migrancy and South African Popular Music,” 378–9; See also Allen, “Representation, Gender and Women.”
22 Israel, South African Political Exile.
23 Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences, ch. 5.
24 Israel, South African Political Exile, 30.
25 Israel, South African Political Exile, 34.
26 Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 63–86.
27 Ballantine, Marabi Nights; Coplan, In Township Tonight!
28 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 11.
29 Dalamba, “Storing and Storying Lives.”
30 See Dalamba, “Storing and Storying Lives,” 66–7.
31 Toynbee, “Music, Culture, and Creativity,” 105.
32 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xiii.
33 Maylam, South Africa's Racial Past, 6.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 8–9.
36 Ibid., 7–8.
37 Olwage, “Music and (Post)Colonialism.”
38 Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat.
39 See Dalamba, “Writing Against Exile,” Ch. 3.
40 The song's Xhosa title translates as “Here comes the black man Verwoerd.” It is also sometimes called “Pasop Verwoerd”—Afrikaans meaning “Beware Verwoerd.”
41 Gilbert, “Popular Music, Gender Equality and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” 11.
42 Minkley and Rasool, “Orality, Memory, and Social History in South Africa,” 95.
43 Gilbert, “Popular Music, Gender Equality and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” 12–4.
44 Allen, “Commerce, Politics, and Musical Hybridity,” 237.
45 Ibid. My emphases.
46 Barnard, “Review. Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony,” 87.
47 Gilbert, “Popular Music, Gender Equality and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” 11.
48 Ibid., 17; see also Minkley and Rassool, “Orality, Memory, and Social History,” 94.
49 Byerly, “Decomposing Apartheid,” 263.
50 Titlestad, Making the Changes, 37.
51 Barnard, “Review,” 86.
52 Ibid., 87.
53 Hennion, “Music and Mediation,” 82.
54 Coplan and Jules-Rosette, “Stories of an African Anthem,” 185. My emphases.
55 Byerly, “Decomposing Apartheid,” 262.
56 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 16–7.
57 Coplan, In Township Tonight!, 336.