S on a visible stage
pre-’94, and we see them still applicable today, we have to ask ourselves really fundamental questions about what, in terms of our new dispensation, is the identifiable change for the masses, for the marginal.
The second important factor for me is: the people who used to sing these songs, who used to feel they owned them, authentically, from a moral high ground, they are sitting on one side of the fence. The people who are singing them as supplicants, as the ruled masses, are sitting on the other side of the fence. I think it’s the first time in our history where the two sides of the political landscape are singing the same songs and claiming them as authentically theirs.
It’s a very paradoxical power dynamic we find ourselves in. I think it’s an opportunity for us to think deeply about what has gone right and what has gone wrong since 1994.
There is a third issue: yes, new songs are being generated but those new songs are referring to older modes of song-making. The struggle songs were mostly laments and hymns of the early 20th-century movement of the kholwa intellectuals. John Dube, Sol Plaatjie — all these people who saw themselves as universal personalities who lived and acted locally.
When the [1913] Land Act is declared, rather than negotiating with the local governorship, they take a ship and go negotiate with the monarch in Europe about their franchise as British citizens and as global citizens. There has been a retreat from that position since the Land Act, but that era of song-making and lament is religious in tone (Nkosi Sikelela, Senzeni Na).
Then we enter a period of protest song that is more warlike, that refers to indlamu and dances. I think that’s where the toyi-toyi becomes a possibility. There is a third phase that we have entered now that comes with songs of lampooning; here people ridicule people in positions of power.