African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2008
African Affairs 2009 108(430):27-48; doi:10.1093/afraf/adn064
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Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song
Liz Gunner (Elizabeth.Gunner{at}wits.ac.za) is Professorial Research Associate at WISER (The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand. She is also a Fellow (2008) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The article was written at NIAS and I am most grateful for the superb institutional support that NIAS provided. A far shorter piece on this topic appeared in the newsletter WISER in Brief 1, 5 (June 2007). For discussion on the present and earlier articles my thanks to Shireen Hassim and to WISER colleagues, in particular Lara Allen, Jon Hyslop, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Irma du Plessis, and Deborah Posel. My thanks also to colleagues of the Mediations of Violence in Africa research group at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, Wassenaar, 2008.
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Abstract |
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 Top Abstract Song, language, and citizenshipRewind - the song...Songs and their publicsThe making of a...The song by the...ConclusionPostscriptNotes |
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This article tracks the life of the song ‘Umshini Wami’ (My Machine Gun) adopted by Jacob Zuma, the President of the African National Congress, since early 2005. It explores the wider implications of political song in the public sphere in South Africa and aims to show how ‘Umshini Wami’ helped Jacob Zuma to prominence and demonstrated a longing in the body politic for a political language other than that of a distancing and alienating technocracy. The article also explores the early pre-Zuma provenance of the song, its links to the pre-1994 struggle period and its entanglement in a seamless masculinity with little place for gendered identities in the new state to come. It argues too that the song can be seen as unstable and unruly, a signifier with a power of its own and not entirely beholden to its new owner.
Umshini wami, umshini wami My machine gun, my machine gunWe Baba Oh Father
Awuleth’ umshini wami Please bring me my machine gun
IT IS NOT OFTEN THAT A POLITICIAN OR PUBLIC FIGURE is so closely associated with a song that it becomes almost a part of his/her skin. Yet that has been the case with the South African politician, Jacob Zuma, now president of the African National Congress, and the song, ‘Umshini Wami’ (‘My Machine Gun’). This unexpected symbiotic link and its wider implications are explored below. In this article I track the life of the song ‘Umshini Wami’ from its first public appearance at the trial of Shabir Shaik in 2005 to the Polokwane African National Congress (ANC) Congress in December 2007. I include commentary on the intervention of a second song, ‘Msholozi’ (Zuma's best-known clan praise name) by the popular group, Izingane ZoMa.1 My main focus, however, is on ‘Umshini Wami’. I discuss the song's provenance, its place as a discursive site enabling multiple publics to participate in national debates, and I comment on its intertwining with the temper and being of political life in South Africa.2
The song ‘Umshini Wami’ was first sung by Zuma, at that time still Deputy President of South Africa, during the trial in Durban in early 2005 of the Durban businessman and former ANC activist, Shabir Shaik, at which Zuma was called to give evidence. Although not on trial himself, Zuma's association with the charged and later convicted fraudster was seen by President Mbeki as sufficient reason for sacking him from his high national office.3 It was in these tense political and personal circumstances for Jacob Zuma that the song ‘Umshini Wami’ first appeared in the arena of national politics. It was new, yet in its tight and deceptively simple structure as well as its resonances of social memory, it was far from new.
In a sense the song played a crucial role in creating a public, indeed different publics for Jacob Zuma. It acted as a catalyst for the involvement of multiple publics in the wider public sphere. It bridged different constituencies in a fragmented and plural polity. It helped create new ‘equivalences’ – as Ernesto Laclau terms this yoking together of heterogeneous interests – in a novel populist configuration in the South African public sphere that cuts across ethnicity, region, and class.4 It brought the sonic and the somatic back into the mainstream of South African politics. By this I mean the presence of song and the dancing body as powerful, unstable signs at work in the making and operation of the public sphere.5 Most important of all, it signalled the instability of song, its unruliness and uncontrollability. Song had to be seen as far more than mere aesthetic decoration. It was far more than a quaint cultural asset to be pulled out for use on public holidays when the old anthems were trundled out, empty of their revolutionary import, and then put in mothballs until the next grand parade. However important song and the powerful tools of rhetoric long nurtured within South African cultures may once have been, their presence seemed to many in the new dispensation diminished, even gone for ever. The impact and cunning reincarnations of such forms may also have been underestimated by the powerful print media and by the print-bound technocrats of the new era. The era of the trade union poets of the 1980s, of ‘people's poet’ Mzwakhe Mbuli, of freedom songs chanted as coffins and crowds snaked their way through the apartheid streets of towns and cities, and the passionate declamations of the praise poems of the Zulu kings may all have looked – to the powerful – too distant to be of any importance at the present time; mere memories, always under control, to be visited when convenient.6 Yet the truth lay elsewhere.
Lara Allen has remarked in the introduction to a recent set of essays on music and politics in Africa that ‘Music functions as a trenchant political site in Africa primarily because it is the most widely appreciated art form on the continent.’ She comments too that music is Africa's most salient popular art and the one that is most comprehensively transmitted through the mass media, and this gives it exceptionally wide reach. ‘It constitutes a large, powerful platform through which public opinion can be influenced.’7 The ease with which the Machine Gun song became a potent presence in the body politic demonstrated anew both the reach and the power of song, and its ability to move swiftly to very different constituencies. The electronic media played a crucial role in this, as I shall point out. More than the media, though, Zuma's sung intervention highlighted the presence of a somatic grammar where the links between body, song, and a wider social meaning assumed a momentary coherence. This yearning for a fit between dance, song, and social being was pointed to by the singer Johnny Clegg before he became a famous and beloved singer of modern Zulu music himself. In the case of the ingoma dance Clegg wrote suggestively in the early 1980s of the way young men, dispossessed in both the rural areas and in the cities to which they moved as migrant workers, created new forms of dance and lyrics which still – in times of stark alienation – formed a consonance between the dancing body and an ideal of social being. Clegg argued that the dances and lyrics worked with the ethic of courage and endurance (‘-qinile’) to create a form of resistant masculinity.8 To inhabit a song, a dance in this way presented a moment of empowerment and an understanding, however fleeting, of why one was alive.9 Song and dance can thus become a means of empowerment and a means by which one inhabits or reinhabits a tainted social space.10 Something of this somatic social energy was evident in the way ‘Umshini Wami’ found a response from the moment of its first airing by Zuma. His performance was itself a very public act of reclamation of voice, sound, and body within the public sphere. The song – and song more widely – became the means by which a group of the marginalized within the African National Congress (ANC) seized back agency and the power to determine the flow of change in the new era.
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Song, language, and citizenship |
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TopAbstractSong, language, and citizenshipRewind - the song...Songs and their publicsThe making of a...The song by the...ConclusionPostscriptNotes |
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The presence of ‘Umshini Wami’, once publicly performed by Zuma, became part of a widening consciousness of song as a catalyst for popular debate in the South African public sphere. The discussions it triggered took place under trees, at bus stops, in taxis, shebeens, coffee shops and bars, as well as in the electronic and print media. Its all-pervasive presence came as a surprise to many. This was so even in a society where popular song – in the form of maskanda and mbube, as well as lyrics by the dramatist and singer Mbongeni Ngema, the late, much-loved Brenda Fassie, and a host of others – has long been a vehicle for trenchant social comment and for the envisioning of new social orders.11
On Zuma himself there were enthusiasts and there were sceptics. In an article in the influential Johannesburg Business Day on 9 September 2006 the writer Xolela Mangcu tagged Zuma as an anti-establishment, populist figure who would have little if any real political substance to offer voters or the country. He could, he implied, be a far worse deal than the incumbent South African President, Thabo Mbeki.12 Headed ‘"Common man" Zuma sets up South Africa's anti-establishment frontier’, the piece decried populism and asked for more on policy from Zuma and less singing. Less than two weeks later, with the state case for postponement of the corruption charges against Zuma thrown off the roll by Judge Herbert Msimang at the Pietermaritzburg High Court, a new line – ‘Ungangibambezeli’ (‘You mustn't delay me’) – was added to ‘Umshini Wami’, and the singing reached a new crescendo.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) Congress, held in Midrand (midway between Johannesburg and Pretoria) on 20 September 2006, provided the venue for both vigorous debate and song, as Zuma arrived from the High Court in Pietermaritzburg to celebrate with them. The trade unions had always acknowledged the place of the dancing body and song in their discursive life. This account of a rehearsal for their 8th Congress in 2003, also at Midrand, shows both their eclectic appetite and their respect for the country's performers:
[Hugh] Masekela rehearses a galaxy of South African stars – Ihash’ elimhlophe, Bambata, Phuzekhemisi, Chicco, Letta Mbulu, Jabu Khanyile, Vusi Mahlasela, Kutu, Jonas Gwangwa, Busi Mhlongo and Sibongile Khumalo – each contributing to a potent concoction of songs evoking the highs and lows of South Africa's recent political struggle. The performers are backed by a thirteen-piece band and 100-strong choir from two COSATU member unions, POPCRU and SADTU13 and the Congress opening concert on 15 September 2003 in Gallagher Estate, Midrand, is spectacular.14
Four years later, song asserted its presence at the COSATU Congress in a no less powerful way. The Citizen newspaper, with a wider, less educated readership than Business Day, caught the euphoria of Jacob Zuma's reception at the COSATU Congress with the heading ‘Hall rings to hero's welcome’:
Thousands of union delegates climbed onto tables and chairs and danced and sang Zuma's trademark song, ‘Awuleth’ Umshini Wami’... . As COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi led the singing from the podium, Zuma clapped alongside him... . Delegates mobbed the podium, displaying the congress labels showing to which of COSATU's 21 unions they belonged... . Others spoke into their cellphones amid the singing, spreading the news of Zuma's arrival to friends. Men hugged one another while they danced... . ‘Go to the hall now comrades – there is nothing more we can do now,’ Vavi told the delegates. ‘Go to the dining hall – we will sing there.’15
In such a scene as the above, song was both theatre and spectacle. It showed politics being performed and it demonstrated what Johannes Fabian has called the ‘liquidity’ of popular culture.16 Men hug each other, mobile phones transmit the news of a hero's arrival to a wider constituency of union supporters. Soon the song itself becomes a mobile phone ring tune, particularly popular among KwaZulu-Natal parliamentarians at the Provincial Parliament in Pietermaritzburg.17
Yet the song also drew boundaries between those perceived as insiders and those seen as outsiders, a point which Mangcu also made in his article in Business Day. Perhaps it did this most insidiously on the topic of gender. At the trial in 2006 of Jacob Zuma for the alleged rape of ‘Khwezi’, the daughter of a fellow activist and comrade in exile, the song had also been much in evidence. It was part of what Shireen Hassim has called the ‘theatrical spectacle’ of the whole event.18 It marked the ugly gender politics that erupted during the case, which showed the weakness of gender equality in the country in spite of the strength of the constitution in this regard. Liberation songs, including ‘Umshini Wami’, were sung at the rape trial by Zuma supporters, as were songs which commented on the marginalization of the poor and the distance of the new elite from those who ruled.19 In all the conflicted and often unclear spaces where Zuma went, the song went. It was again much in evidence as part of the tussle of debate and singing when in mid-December 2007 Jacob Zuma/Msholozi/JZ (as he is also known) was a clear winner at Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg) in the election of the new president of the African National Congress – ahead of his co-contender, President Thabo Mbeki.
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Rewind – the song as proverb |
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TopAbstractSong, language, and citizenshipRewind - the song...Songs and their publicsThe making of a...The song by the...ConclusionPostscriptNotes |
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From its very first airing in 2005 during the Shaik trial, ‘Umshini Wami’ seemed to slip easily into the stream of common speech and song. The song was brief yet invited repetition. With its brevity and its antiphonal call and answer structure, inviting the audience to participate, it seemed part of a vernacular of the everyday. People recognized it as part of a social language that they knew. It came into its public life as a song that went with a singer as s/he went forward to speak. Its usage thus signalled an ease of public knowledge of ‘how to behave’ that cut across region, ethnicity, even class: at a multitude of different kinds of gatherings in South Africa – funerals, celebrations, political meetings – a speaker will often go to the podium dancing, and singing a song that the gathering picks up and sings with her or him. Momentarily it becomes ‘her’ or ‘his’ song, but it is also a song known to a much wider body. This shared knowledge and cultural commonality is marked by the song.
‘Umshini Wami’ became a wider, more public instance of the song with which you mark your entry and which the gathering then sings with you. Song and the dancing body had taken centre stage as a discursive intervention by a senior politician and, like a miniature dramatic performance, it had captured a structure of feeling in the body politic. The song was taken up, hummed in public places. Radio announcers on the Zulu-language South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) station Ukhozi FM tossed off its phrases sotto voce; short clips of Jacob Zuma in song, legs poised gracefully in dance, at times in a leather jacket, at others wearing an Armani suit, and sometimes at ease and confident in a Zulu ibeshu (kilt) and traditional attire appeared in media news items; Khethiwe, a character in Generations – one of the country's best known soaps – chanted it briefly at a time of crisis as she searched for a solution. ‘Umshini Wami’ circulated along different networks of distinct speech communities. In the way it floated, was used and re-used, played around with, it resembled a stock phrase or a proverb. It was heard in different contexts, different constituencies took it up; it was seen scrawled across banners and on the sides of cardboard machine guns touted by ladies in traditional dress outside the courtrooms where Zuma was present.20 It also became part of a scurrilous subversive lingo, which mocked and criticized the song's ‘owner’ and at the same time showed the power of the demotic voice to question authority and assert its own presence. Thus one irreverent sung version, that began to circulate after the charge of rape was laid against Jacob Zuma in December 2005, was ‘Cherrie wami, cherrie wami/Awuleth’ ucherrie wami’ (‘My sweety pie, my sweety pie/ O bring me my sweety pie’). Zulu and demotic Afrikaans held hands briefly in this new adaptation. Another filtered in a slightly altered but recognizable form into student protest and became the headline of a Wits University Vuvuzela edition protesting at the delay in the university handing out its student financial aid grants: ‘Awuleth’ imali yami’ (‘Bring me my money’).21
The song moved fast, was both recognizable and adaptable. It could poke fun at implied sexual impropriety – thus reflecting naughtily on the events around Zuma's rape trial in early 2006. It could call for justice; it spoke to and with different constituencies in a fragmented and plural polity.22 Like a proverb, text-like, the song began to have a life of its own and to illuminate the broader social sites in which it appeared.23 In a searching article on the proverb, its continuing role in oratory and politics in some countries of the world, and its demise as cultural capital in Europe since the rise of print literacy, James Olkawitch comments: ‘Anonymous, traditional, authoritative, they have an existence of their own, independent of authors, speakers and hearers alike.’24 Olkawitch notes the way a proverb is often seen to have ‘a sort of community or common sense speaking through it’ and that ‘the social and the public are very much in their mode of operation’.25 Proverbs in sixteenth-century England were part of the cultural capital of the educated – ‘instruments of persuasion and ornaments of style’. However, by the twentieth century educated people had rejected them. Proverbs began to be seen as part of a restricted code encapsulating and imprisoning experience. They became distanced from the elite, who viewed them ‘as a linguistic "other" associated with peasants, plebeians and the petty bourgeoisie’.26 Olkawitch throws out a final provocative remark about the regulation of social life and the role of such bounded linguistic items as proverbs, stock epithets and ‘politeness formulae’ that were popular in what he calls ‘traditional Europe’. He concludes, ‘Proverbs, we may remind ourselves, existed before books’ and it is ‘not books but the old sayings which regulate human conduct’.27
Yet why should a plain song with few words and even a kind of melodic monotony play such a marked role in the South African public sphere at the present time? Why, too, should the power of this particular song have been so underrated and unrecognized by media commentators and sections of the elite when it first broke on the public scene? If the ‘Umshini Wami’ song did have some aspects of the proverb or stock phrase, and if it somehow linked to a social world of formal exchanges that gestured to an imagined social stability, is that enough to explain its swift passage through so many communities, and its resilience? Its passage relates perhaps to its links to the store of public forms of oratory and registers that flourish more in circuits of speech and song than in print. Nathalie Arnold's comment on the movement of two taarab songs at a time of political tension in Zanzibar is relevant here: Speech genres, she remarks, are not hermetic:
Songs exist not simply as entire ‘texts’ but as funds of knowledge to be deployed in segments, allusions and unframed social expression, in order to communicate and instantiate identities and political positioning. [She remarks that the two taarab songs she discusses]... reveal[ed] important connections between politics as such and cultural knowledge, communicative forms and appropriate relations betweens people and places.28
It was perhaps partly the song's linkage with cultural knowledge and communicative forms and practice that allowed it the swift passage along so many different circuits to which I have referred above. Few forms move in that way. The clan praise name ‘Madiba’, for former President Mandela, is an example of one such name that has crossed over into print and provides a linkage between disparate speech communities. Jacob Zuma's clan praise name, ‘Msholozi’, may prove another. Echoes of this intimate yet public and respectful register of formality come through briefly into wider multi-lingual public usage and into the print media when former President Nelson Mandela is addressed and widely referred to as Madiba, his honorific clan praise name. But it is a brief appearance.
All the above points may be valid. Yet equally important to consider is the song's easy linkage with the electronic media and with the strongly established maskanda music tradition out of which the second song, ‘Msholozi’, sprang. The swift passage and wide circulation of the ‘Msholozi’ song fed into the discursive ‘fatness’ of ‘Umshini Wami’ and into its links to forms of cultural knowledge. Another reason for the song's resilience and popularity, which I discuss below, was its deep links with the liberation songs of the struggle era, and its birth (or partial birth) in that time.
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Songs and their publics |
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TopAbstractSong, language, and citizenshipRewind - the song...Songs and their publicsThe making of a...The song by the...ConclusionPostscriptNotes |
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There is nothing new about the idea that songs travel or that they have political clout. The most widely travelled songs may well be those of Irish origin, along with those that travelled with early north American settlers to the Appalachians of the southern states of North America.29 Taken in such a context, the ‘Umshini Wami’ song is a normal rather than an unusual phenomenon. Africa teems with the temporal and spatial journeying of various kinds of song, poetic speech, and narrative. They travel, they metamorphose, they die, sometimes they are reborn and they give birth. They are the midwives to new ideas and new social visions. They summon up collective memory with amazing speed.30 They can provide platforms for debate and for an evolving discourse on a range of topics. Often the electronic media have facilitated rather than hampered such journeyings, sometimes with unpredictable results. This has been the case with the role played by the Kenyan popular song ‘Who Can Bwogo Me?’ later called ‘Unbwogable’, in suggesting a way out of ethnic divisions in the modern Kenyan nation in 2002 and 2003. Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude further show how the song, originally one of protest, was hijacked by President Kibaki and his party, the NARC. They argue that songs are not innocent, and their passage is not as spontaneous and informal as we would sometimes imagine.31 Sometimes songs are short and cryptic and in other cases they are epics that combine song and recited speech. They have travelled both within the continent and globally, and have become part of both national and global flows of media. The Senegalese singer, Salif Keita, has used fragments of the Sunjata epic in his world music. Somali poetry, in particular the gabay form, has found new life on the Internet and radio as it debates and comments upon the current Somali clan conflicts.32 In the southern African region chimurenga (liberation) songs played a key role in the struggle that led to Zimbabwean independence in 1980, and in some cases songs in Ndebele/isiZulu were shared by ZAPU and ANC fighters.33 As Alec Pongweni points out in an important article on chimurenga songs that extends the scope of his authoritative book of the early 1980s:
The artists did not invent new tunes, nor did they introduce novel song structures in their compositions. Their songs hugged the common cultural ground that they shared with their audiences.34
The eruption of ‘Umshini Wami’ onto the public stage in South Africa in 2005 underlined the long (if partially forgotten) genealogy of political song in that country. It was often a means of uniting those who faced a dangerous and powerful enemy, and such music stretched back at least to the first use of Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika by the African National Congress in the second decade of the twentieth century.35 Liberation songs were a part of the sonic landscape of resistance before the turn to the armed struggle. They were sung in jails by those condemned to die, at trials, and by great gatherings in the most public of South African spaces. In 1956, for instance, singers on the ANC women's march on the Union Buildings adapted a Zulu ihubo lempi (a war song) ‘Wathint’ amadoda...’ (You’ve struck men ...) into
Wathint’ abafazi You’ve struck womenWathint’ imbokodo You’ve hit a grinding stone
Uzofa! You will die!36
In this same era the greatest composer of freedom songs was the Port Elizabeth trade-unionist, Vuyisile Mini, who was hanged by the apartheid regime in 1964.37 According to contemporaries who were with him in Pretoria Central Prison, he went to the gallows singing, along with fellow prisoners, his militant composition,
Verwoerd pasopa Watch out VerwoerdNants’ indod’ emnyama. Here comes the black man.38
Zuma's song links back to this earlier time. Yet it exists in a transformed political era of vastly different constituencies and with very different passages of communication possible. ‘Umshini Wami’, proverb-like, slogan-like, with a tight yet flexible structure, was perhaps the catalyst for a bundle of ideas which it enabled to surface with more vigour in public debate – in bars, at bus stops, in buses and taxis, as well as at larger meetings such as those of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). It helped propel ex-Deputy President Jacob Zuma, now ANC president, along his publicity-strewn path. The timing of its ‘release’ seemed to coincide with a particular structure of feeling in the country, namely a widespread anxiety and dissatisfaction concerning the nature of governance in South Africa. When the public, in all its fragmented plurality, was sated with images of suited politicians and the distancing language of technocracy, when the dancing bodies and the performed language of the struggle were a distant echo, recalled at COSATU and SACP rallies – suddenly, the beleaguered soon to be ex-Deputy President broke on the national scene with a song. It was not a glancing gesture to tradition, such as Jomo Kenyatta's famous flywhisk. Nor was it a song that inscribed authenticity and suggested a Mobutu Sese Seko-like erasure of modernity in the swift transfer of ‘tradition’ in the passage from village to public square.39
The song, chosen by Zuma himself and brought (back) into circulation by him with ease and elegance, broke into popular public memory by recalling an earlier and more dangerous way of being. It evoked the years of pre-1994 resistance to the apartheid regime, the tense urban gatherings and the mass funerals. It forced back into the public imagination memories and stories of the long marches through the bush, lost family members, and the camps to the north in the countries which had hosted the freedom fighters. These were all sites marked by song as an expressive tool. Song was a means of capturing and giving expression to the aspirations, the anxieties and the vision of people in that particularly turbulent and painful moment in South Africa's history.40 That is the provenance of ‘Umshini Wami’. It is a song from the belly of the struggle.
Umshini wami My machine gunUmshini wami My machine gun
We Baba Oh Father
Awuleth’ umshini wami. Please bring me my machine gun.
Like many of the songs of the struggle years, the weapon of the soldier/hero figure is mentioned – the AK-47 or famed Kalashnikov – which still features in the national flag of Mozambique as a reminder of the armed struggle in that country. ‘Umshini Wami’ is not a new song, and therein lies part of its strength. It was sung by the rebellious youth in places like Orlando in Soweto and also in the camps beyond the country's borders. Like the constant flow of cadres moving silently within the country and across its borders, the song, too, passed in and out, circulating unseen if not unheard.
Songs would also change, expand. They could collect a new line or phrase to amplify an idea held in the song, or add a different thought, or piece of news. Fighters would bring new songs in from the camps to fill out existing ones. An example, cited to me in 2005 by a taxi driver on a journey home from Johannesburg airport41 as he recalled the public songs of the townships in the 1980s, was one the youth of Orlando would sing:
Tambo uzonginika ibazuka Tambo will be handing me a bazookaIzakhal’ iAK madoda! It’ll come as the AK screeches, men!42
And then, the taxi driver Fifi recalled, a young fighter called Sol came in bringing with him a new piece from the camps in Tanzania. The piece that was added went like this:
Khona manje sengilal’ emoyeni Here and now I sleep in the wildIzimpimpi zilal’ emakhaya. The informers sleep cosy at home.
The whole song then became a combination of the two segments, with the lead voice taking the ‘Tambo’ lines and the addition from Sol fitting in the middle. The ‘new’ song thus demonstrates the way in which ideas become amplified in song. The idea of the hero fighter and his/her courage and devotion to the leader, in this case Oliver Tambo, from 1985 commander-in-chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, was accentuated and expanded by the addition transmitted by ‘Sol’. The song became doubly autobiographical. It highlighted the hardships of the guerrilla fighter sleeping emoyeni, while the informers – izimpimpi – slept comfortably in their beds at home. It marked off insiders from outsiders, the struggling righteous just from the comfortable unjust, and it reached in a utopian gesture towards an inversion of this in a new and just social order yet to come, where the outsider/guerrilla fighter would become the insider/citizen.
‘Umshini Wami’ comes from the same cultural field as the lines quoted above – the liberation song. Both carry the cultural capital of the outsider striving to become the new insider; both carry the weight of the ‘just war’. And, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown us, cultural capital itself can shift and displace what was there before.43 If the Tambo song was sung in two such different sites as Orlando and the camps in Tanzania, so was ‘Umshini Wami’. Its resurrection, even in the difficult circumstances of the fraud trial of Zuma's close associate, still allowed the memories of the brave young, and not so young, buried in shallow graves in the old war zones to resurface at a moment of national confusion and anxiety. The song worked on one level as a compelling image of the struggle years, the armed struggle and the pain and euphoria of that era. In this way it resonates with poetry of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, for instance that by the writer Musamura Zimunya, which in its prophet-like rhetoric saw the guerrilla figure as the icon of ‘the new man and the new woman’.44 Yet the song, unlike Zimunya's poem but like many songs of the liberation era, was embedded in a largely masculinist conception of militarism and nationalism. One of the few exceptions to this must be the 1956 anthem of the Women's March on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, still widely sung nationally on 9 August, Women's Day, ‘Wathint’abafazi/Wathint’ imbokodo’, to which I have referred above. The machine gun, too, as unstable signifier, sent a warning to any complacent settling into a negotiated liberal democracy at the very same time that it gave hope to the longing for social and political change. It was utopian but it held, too, the possibility of a violent praxis.
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The making of a song |
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TopAbstractSong, language, and citizenshipRewind - the song...Songs and their publicsThe making of a...The song by the...ConclusionPostscriptNotes |
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Alec Pongweni has said of the chimurenga songs that they were successful because they ‘hugged the common cultural ground ... shared with their audiences’.45 What were the precise details of the cultural ground that ‘Umshini Wami’ emerged from in its first coming into being as a liberation song? The songs that travelled with cadres between the camps beyond South Africa's borders and into the country had their genesis in the particular cultural forms that the military camps produced. These drew on a range of cultural referents, forms, and genres. The songs produced in the camps were often a part of wider debates within the liberation movement and tied into the desires of combatants. This was the case in the culture produced by both the ZANU and ZAPU camps during the Zimbabwe liberation struggle. Preben Kaarsholm, writing on culture in ZAPU camps, notes that they functioned as entertainment, that they could unite, and also stimulate discussion on points of policy and future direction. From interviews with former liberation fighters such as Attwell Mabhena, ZAPU's schools coordinator, Paulos Matjaka, and others, Kaarsholm noted there was debate between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernists’ in the camps. He commented too on the role of ‘more secular forms of dance, song, choir performances and enactment of dramatic tableaux’ which were encouraged ‘both as forms of entertainment and as stimulants of cultural nationalism’.46 In the ZAPU camps in Zambia, schoolchildren would perform songs and dances in praise of the old Ndebele kings Mzilikazi kaMashobane and his son Lobengula, and also on more modern figures, exploiting the ability to criticize and mock, as well as praise, that praise poetry allows. In both ZAPU and ZANU camps soldiers – who were often also students – performed varieties of drama, ranging from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Julius Caesar to a more community-type drama reflecting on the everyday problems and politics of the camps. ‘Dramatisation became a way of expressing your needs and getting what you wanted,’ Kaarsholm noted.47
In the case of the South African liberation struggle the public face of culture and struggle was shown at first by the Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble and later by the ANC cultural group, Amandla, which toured in the 1980s in cities such as London which had strong bases of sympathy for the South African liberation struggle, and strong anti-apartheid movements.48 Little, however, was publicly known about how the soldiers of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto weSizwe (MK), made culture in the camps, although it could be inferred that the songs, dramatic skits, and echoes of popular dances like the gumboot dance were also performed in the camps. Here too there were dramatic productions, and also song competitions.49 Cultural competitions were a mark of the life of bases that together made up a single camp and competitions for the best song were frequent occurrences. The songs that were sung on marches through the bush, in drills and practices and in the camps, would have been both old and new, and drew on a wide body of cultural knowledge.50 Exploiting a well-established pattern of commentary through performance, a song could reflect on a recent occurrence, express a desire or an idea, and form a means of discursive debate.
Competitions, which have long been a way of producing new songs and dances and are a deep feature of rites of passage events such as weddings, were a feature of life in the camps. They could themselves be a means of commenting on matters that it might be difficult to air any other way. The ‘Umshini Wami’ song, according to one source,51 was first composed as a way of giving voice to the desire to return ‘home’ and fight. It had its first airing at a competition at one of the Angolan camps, and came from the base known as Cetshwayo – the name of the Zulu king who was forced into war with Britain, and whose armies won a pyrrhic victory at Isandlwana in 1879. ‘Umshini Wami’, first sung by the singers competing from the Cetshwayo base, easily won the competition and soon became widely known and very popular. Besides the song's deep aesthetic appeal, which may have come from its melodic and rhythmic similarity with amahubo empi (war songs) and with the slow dignity of clan amahubo, it caught the urgency of cadres’ desire to return home and ‘fight’, and use their imishini, as the AK47s were called. The song spread – in a way not dissimilar to its later quick movement in its next incarnation as Jacob Zuma's song. It was used to greet Oliver Tambo on one of his visits to the Angolan camp, when he was in fact coming with a more pacifist message.52
The song was itself part of an unresolved debate about how to fight the ‘just war’. The very composers and early performers of the song were themselves locked into an authority structure where public discussion was not easy. In addition the song through which they revealed their deep desires to fight on home ground was also part of a liberation movement which did not resolve the question of how gender equality was to function in ‘the future heaven’ of the post-apartheid state.53 As Hassim has argued, the militaristic aspect of the liberation struggle in exile tended to push out and sideline organizational aspects of gender equality in a new society.54 Anne McClintock and others have long argued that both national liberation movements and nationalism as an ideology have been highly resistant to demands for gender equality.55 Hassim notes, too, that although nationalist politics provided a crucial context for the politicization of women, it did not easily accommodate women's demands for autonomy, articulate their interests, or develop strategies that would advance gender equality.56
Thus the song, both new and yet old, somewhat chameleon-like, somewhat free, carried as one of its resonances the gendered discourse of nationalism and the unresolved question of the role of women in war. Yet it also sprang from the desire of its first soldier-composer(s) and singers for a change of policy and articulated a deep need to return and create the just state. In this sense it was always much more than an ethnic Zulu composition trading in ethnic boundaries. It was a song of the dispossessed and of the citizen-to-come. Perhaps at the heart of the song is the verb ‘-letha’ (‘bring’) suggesting a movement of process, of moving towards something yet to be made; suggesting too that the action is sanctioned by a giver or bringer. The instrument of the machine gun, umshini wami, suggests not so much the brute power of war but that of agency, and the ability of the individual sanctioned by the group to bring about change.
Nevertheless – was/is ‘Umshini Wami’ not nostalgic? Even anachronistic? Writers as diverse as Alec Pongweni, Maurice Bloch and Paul Zumthor have each emphasized the power of rhetoric and song to escape time and swing the past into the present public moment.57 Thus an anthem, a praise poem, a struggle song can have the ability to collapse time. It can bring back the image or complex of memories and particular political character of an earlier era. For those who recognize it as such, it exercises powerful recall. But what it also does, sometimes, is gather momentum and gravitas in a new situation.
The ‘Umshini’ song, as I have mentioned, came at a moment of social and political uncertainty, even a kind of anomie, when many, particularly those outside the new and aspirant elite, felt not optimism but what Thomas Blom Hansen has called the ‘melancholia of freedom’.58 This is perhaps the particular genius of the song. Its choice was superbly timed. The icon of the heroic guerrilla fighter was melded with that of the beleaguered senior politician, of impeccable freedom credentials. Until the days before Polokwane Jacob Zuma was frequently at odds with a largely unfriendly media. A figure, many argue, judged probably guilty before convicted in a court of law, and shunned by a distant leader seemingly out of touch with many of his public. Out of such material modern myths and legends are made and new heroes emerge. But even heroes need allies, and it is the intervention of the second Zuma song cut by the maskandi singers, Izingane ZoMa, in November 2005 to which I now turn.59
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The song by the maskandi singers Izingane ZoMa, and its impact60 |
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The discontent in the body politic which ‘Umshini Wami’ captured so remarkably was not being aired in song for the first time. One of its outlets was through maskanda music, a genre of popular song with a wide following, particularly among the working and would-be working classes, the unemployed, the rural poor and blue collar workers. The maskanda genre, with such powerful exponents as the late Mfaz’ Omnyama and the popular Phuzekhemisi, has always maintained the right of those on the far edges of power to comment on the social and political and to represent the voices of those who might otherwise go unheard.61 In the months before the trial of Shabir Shaik, discomfort had bubbled up through the popular compositions of the maskandi musicians and others; these songs enjoyed a wide circulation through radio, audio-cassettes and CDs. Two songs by Phuzekhemisi captured this discomfort particularly well. ‘Imbizo’, sung by Phuzekhemisi with Khethani, questioned the wisdom of traditional leaders, the amakhosi, in calling great gatherings of their people, the rural poor, and then requesting funds for a particular project, when there was such widespread poverty. So popular was this song, and so successful in registering popular unrest, that it was banned by the SABC and thus barred from being played on the Zulu-language radio station, Ukhozi FM, the largest and most successful of all the African-language stations in the public broadcasting system, with a listenership in the region of 6 million.62 A second song by Phuzekhemisi, ‘Amakhansela’, focused on corrupt councillors and urged the public not to vote for such figures again.63 A third song, ‘Inja Yami’ (‘My Dog’) even raised the issue of ‘the dog tax that people in the villages were expected to pay’.64
Songs such as these, which asserted the people's right to engage in the democratic process and used a popular urban/rural form, were listened to by the constituency I have already mentioned: such listeners bought their music, heard it in bars and taxis, or went to concerts up and down the KwaZulu-Natal region in particular, where maskandi singers would play. Sometimes the eminent Phuzekhemisi would play at international events such as the inauguration of the African Union celebration in Durban in 2002, or even be sent to Japan to be ‘the South African’ singing voice – thus becoming part of a South African sonic imaginary. In such ambassadorial contexts a barbed but beautiful song would often not be fully intelligible to many in the audience.
It was into this highly charged and unstable public space, which now also contained ‘Umshini Wami’, that another group of maskandi singers boldly moved: with women lead singers and male backing, this was Izingane ZoMa (Mother's Children).65 They wanted to give voice to one widely held view of Jacob Zuma, or Msholozi as they preferred to call him, respectfully using his clan praise name. And they intended giving him their backing at a moment of high contestation in the public domain. Thus in early November 2005 (before the charge of rape was laid against him) Izingane zoMa recorded their own song on Jacob Zuma and pressed both audio-cassette and CD with the title ‘Msholozi’. The title song, highlighting the best-known of Jacob Zuma's clan praise names, called for all charges (of corruption) against Zuma to be withdrawn, and for his reinstatement as Deputy President. He could then prepare to be the next President, which, the song declared, was what Mandela had wanted.
The linkage of Zuma's name with that of Mandela was not based on any proven ‘fact’ but rather on the popular desire of the communities to which the singers tuned in. Zuma, the linkage suggests, was a rightful heir to Mandela in terms of what he stood for in his broad appeal across ethnic, language, and class divisions. He too, the song suggested, could like Mandela be a symbol of the nation that was itself made up of pluralities.66 The song was played for a short while on the Zulu-language station Ukhozi FM, but soon withdrawn and banned from the air as listeners complained – or so it was claimed – that it was divisive.
The very act of banning the song, however, immediately raised hackles (and sales). In a spirited article in the Natal Witness of 2 March 2006, Thabo Manyathi questioned ‘the autocratic and unilateral decision by SABC Ukhozi to ban the playing of the song’. Manyathi linked the role of singers like Phuzekhemisi and Izingane ZoMa to that of former praise singers who presented issues that ordinary subjects would find difficult to express to the existing authority. He called the maskandi singers ‘the voice of the voiceless’ and showed the way in which a song can intervene in a public, national debate:
The lyrics [words?] of the song imply that Parliament is sabotaging the will of the people who want Zuma to become the President. This is a generally held view in shebeens, churches, trains, boardrooms and bedrooms. Therefore Izingane Zoma is merely expressing that popular view which would otherwise not find a view on the airwaves.67
As Thabo Manyathi mentioned, sales continued to soar, ‘the more so after the banning’.68 Both the CD and cassette sold thousands. CDs and audio-cassettes of Msholozi were set out in neat piles by small sellers on pavements and street corners in Pietermaritzburg; they were sold in the small music shops and played by taxi drivers in Gauteng who blocked passageways outside the Supreme Court and blared out the song from the vehicles as the rape case continued inside.69 The ‘Msholozi’ song was not dampened by the rape charges against Jacob Zuma. Rather, it continued to give impetus to his campaign to run for President. Another less controversial lyric was cut by another group, and played on Ukhozi FM in early and mid-2006. The phrase umshini wami as proverb-like shorthand for Zuma's outsider status – seen as representative of various groups in the new dispensation as well as his own political positioning – began to be tossed around in the songs of isicathamiya (mbube) groups as different teams debated, through song, on platforms in dusty halls, or on CDs and cassettes, the rights and wrongs of Jacob Zuma's cause.70 These songs sometimes sneaked their way into the late-night isicathamiya (mbube) programmes on Ukhozi FM. Maskandi singers suddenly seemed to be performing at venues up and down KwaZulu-Natal. Their presence as voices of popular culture that tuned in to outrage, anxiety, and alarm, sometimes providing answers, was unmistakable.71 And then, on 20 September 2006, as the state charge of corruption was struck off the rolls by Judge Msimang, the new line that seemed to catch the popular mood of the moment – ‘Ungangibambezeli’ (‘You mustn't delay me’) – crept authorless into ‘Umshini Wami’, as the race for the soon-to-be-elected ANC president intensified. The rest is not history but history in the making.
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Conclusion |
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TopAbstractSong, language, and citizenshipRewind - the song...Songs and their publicsThe making of a...The song by the...ConclusionPostscriptNotes |
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The debating of urgent social and political matters in song, in Southern Africa and elsewhere, is not new.72 What has not fully been acknowledged, however, is the place of song as debate and as a discursive presence within the public sphere and the body politic. The song which has been at the centre of this article has not gone away after Jacob Zuma's December 2007 election as president of the ANC. It springs up in many places. It was mentioned in a Cape Argus report on Zuma's visit along with MK veterans to Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, in March 2008, where he ‘vowed to champion monuments for fallen MK cadres’.73 A new CD with his own voice on it, and his unsuited image on the cover, which was passed around bars and sold in small music outlets in downtown Johannesburg and in KwaZulu-Natal, was sold, too, at the ANC's Polokwane Congress and still circulates.
But what has happened to the image of the AK-47? Is it still the same potent symbol of violence now – not in the bush but at the heart of the discourse on power in the post-struggle state? Is the song perhaps as dangerous in its espousal of a culture of violence as it is liberating?74 The xenophobic riots in South Africa in May 2008 did in some places echo to the sound of the ‘Umshini Wami’ song as desperate mobs turned on the foreign citizens who were living amongst them. But the song does not have a single master, and debate and the praxis of violence can spring from the same source. In early May 2008, as the anti-foreigner riots swept the poorest areas, some sang ‘Umshini Wami’ as they rampaged. Others, at a meeting, told Jacob Zuma to ‘Go back to Mozambique with your Mozambicans.’75 The song is not a solution, only a symptom, a sign. It has been a catalyst releasing the sorrows of the poor and the passed-over onto the national stage. It has brought the dancing body and song back within the realms of discourse and debate in the public sphere. It may not have been a mere whim that made the composers of the maskanda song ‘Msholozi’ link the names of Mandela and Zuma. It perhaps represented a popular perception that in some way each of these figures hinted at a suppressed ontology that links discourse, song, and performance in the African body politic. Mandela in his return to political life after 1990 never performed the graceful culturally allusive dance steps that have marked Zuma's ‘Umshini Wami’ performances. Yet Mandela danced his famous ‘Mandela shuffle’, the painfully slow yet graceful moves that pointed to a dancing past, present, and future held in social memory and political practice. The huge Mandela statue in Sandton Square, in upmarket Johannesburg, depicts the old hero in a Mandela shirt, dancing. The many lives of ‘Umshini Wami’ are far from over. Sung by some of the most desperate and forgotten in the new era at moments of crisis such as the xenophobic riots, it has moved too into the repertoires of choirs. It features now in the songs of the choir of Holy Cross Church, Orlando West, alongside the 1956 Women's March song, ‘Wathint’ abafazi’, other liberation songs, and other choral items such as ‘Amazing Grace’.76 When the choir sang it after the church's 66th birthday service on Sunday 14 September, someone in the congregation asked for it again and they sang it again, even more vigorously, moving as they did so.
Jacob Zuma's powerful, unruly song – with its weighty solemnity carrying the gravitas of a Zulu war song, the weight of heavy masculinity, echoes of the just struggle for a free country, shards of the anger of those who feel the new dispensation has brought them nothing – has muddied the political discourse of the last three years. It has shown up the troubled waters under the surface of the new era. What I have attempted to show in this article is how the passage and presence of one song in the public domain has to be taken seriously. The song as unstable sign has shown power, unruliness, slipperiness. It has become fat and has produced multiple messages which relate largely to the figure of the outsider, but also to a new presence of song and performance within the modern body politic. Through its use it has absorbed new meanings, and in its liquid, volatile state it can change again. It has helped forge unlikely alliances, and it may yet help forge new ones.77
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Postscript |
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After the judgement by Judge Chris Nicholson in the Pietermaritzburg High Court on 12 September 2008, Jacob Zuma sang and danced outside the court again. This time the song was not ‘Umshini Wami’ but a war song (ihubo lempi), sad, slow, with complicated un-Western cadences. It was about a young man back from war and covered with many wounds. The crowd took it up and sang too, uncertainly.
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Notes |
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1 To address, or even to refer to someone by his (or less frequently her) clan praise name is a sign of respect and good manners widely practised by speakers of isiZulu. Every Zulu clan name or surname (isibongo) has its set of praise names which carry the condensed and elliptic poetic history of the clan founders. To address a person by one or more of these (izithakazelo; singular: isithakazelo) not only shows respect and good manners; it is also a mark of shared cultural knowledge.
2 For contemporary song as a discursive site in a Somali context, see Lidwien Kapteijns, ‘The discourse on moral womanhood in Somali popular songs (1960–1990)’, Journal of African History 49, 2 (2008) forthcoming. See also Lidwien Kapteijns with Maryan Omar Ali, Women's Voices in a Man's World: Women and the pastoral tradition in northern Somali orature c. 1889–1980 (Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, 1999).
3 For reports of the 12 September 2008 ruling by Judge Chris Nicholson in the Pietermaritzburg Supreme Court on whether Jacob Zuma's case could be carried forward, see Karina Brown and Hajra Omarjee, ‘Ruling dents Mbeki's repute’; Ernest Mabuza, ‘Court scuttles case against Zuma’; Carmel Rickard, ‘Conspiracy theory had merit – judge’, all in The Weekender, 13–14 September 2008, p. 2, <www.theweekender.co.za>.
4 Xolela Mangcu, ‘"Common man" Zuma sets up South Africa's anti-establishment frontier’, Business Day, 9 September 2006, <www.businessday.co.za>. On populism of the left and the right see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (Verso, London, 2005).
5 For a compelling account of ‘soundscape’ and the semiotics of sound in a Zimbabwean church, see Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007); also on sound and the Western preoccupation with the visual see Paul Stoller, ‘Sound in Songhay cultural experience’, American Ethnologist 12, 3 (1984), pp. 559–70.
6 The literature on the manifold operations of song and poetry in southern African societies – precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial – is vast. See, for instance: Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: Voices in Southern African history (James Currey, London, 1991); Liz Gunner and Mafika Gwala (eds and translators), Musho! Zulu popular praises (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, 1991). For an overview of the long history and continuing presence of orality in African societies, see Liz Gunner, ‘Africa and orality’ in Abiola Irele and Simon Gikandi (eds), The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), Vol. 1, pp. 1–18, reproduced in Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson (eds), African Literature: An anthology of criticism and theory (Blackwell, Oxford, 2007), pp. 67–73.
7 Lara Allen, ‘Music and politics in Africa’, Social Dynamics 30, 2 (2004), pp. 1, 3. See also Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa: Making music Zulu in a South African Studio (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003).
8 For more recent work on dance, song, and resistant masculinities by subaltern groups see Louise Meintjes, ‘Shoot the sergeant, shatter the mountain: the production of masculinity in Zulu ngoma song and dance in post-apartheid South Africa’, Ethnomusicology Forum 13, 2 (2004), pp. 173–201. Meintjes worked with singers in the Keate's Drift section of rural Msinga. This is the area, on the old Natal side of the Thukela River, where Clegg in the 1980s learnt from an earlier generation of dancers, singers and historians. North of Msinga, on the old KwaZulu side of the Thukela, lies Nkandla, the home district of Jacob Zuma, Msholozi. All the above now fall in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. On masculinities in South Africa, see the groundbreaking work by Robert Morrell (ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa (University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2001). See in particular Chapter 1, Robert Morrell, ‘The times of change: men and masculinity in South Africa’, pp. 3–37.
9 See Johnny Clegg, ‘Towards an understanding of African dance: the Zulu isishameni style’ in Andrew Tracey (ed.), Papers Presented at the Second Symposium on Ethnomusicology (ILAM, Rhodes University, Grahamstown,1982), pp. 8–14. For Clegg on maskanda music, see Johnny Clegg, ‘The music of Zulu immigrant workers in Johannesburg: a focus on concertina and guitar’ in Andrew Tracey (ed.), Papers Presented at the First Symposium on Ethnomusicology (ILAM, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1981), pp. 1–8.
10 I build here on Clegg's ideas, also on conversations with Ben Carton. On pleasure, music, and empowerment, see Lara Allen, ‘Music and politics’; also Achille Mbembe, ‘Variations on the beautiful in Congolese worlds of sound’ in Sarah Nuttall (ed.), Beautiful Ugly: African and diaspora aesthetics (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006), pp. 62–93.
11 See the rich and extensive work by Veit Erlmann on mbube (also called isicathamiya or ingom’ebusuku, nightsong): African Stars: Studies in black South African performance (Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, 1991); Veit Erlmann, Nightsong: Performance, power and practise in South Africa (Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, 1996); Veit Erlmann, ‘But hope does not kill: black popular music in Durban, 1913–1939’ in Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards (eds), The People's City: African life in twentieth-century Durban (University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1996), pp. 66–101.
12 Xolela Mangcu has been called ‘a dogged critic’ of President Thabo Mbeki. He is the author of To the Brink: The state of democracy in South Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2008). On Zuma and the ANC leadership struggle see also William M. Gumede, ‘South Africa: Jacob Zuma and the difficulties of consolidating South Africa's democracy’, African Affairs 107, 427 (2008), pp. 261–71. Gumede does not mention song.
13 Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union and South African Democratic Teachers Union.
14 Tom Collins, ‘Constructing maskanda’, South African Music Studies 26/27 (2006/2007), p. 3.
15 The Citizen, 21 September, 2006, p. 8. A longer item on the same page is headed, ‘COSATU tide turning in favour of Zuma camp’.
16 Johannes Fabian, ‘Popular culture in Africa’, Africa 48, 4 (1978), pp. 315–34.
17 Personal communication from Rogier Coureau, 3 November 2006.
18 Shireen Hassim, ‘Democracy's shadows: the trial of Jacob Zuma and gender rights in South Africa’, unpublished paper, 2008.
19 Hassim, ‘Democracy's shadow’, p. 2; Pumla Gqola, ‘How the "cult of femininity" and violent masculinities support endemic gender based violence in contemporary South Africa’, African Identities 5, 1 (2007), pp. 111–24.
20 See, for instance, the picture in The Star, 21 September 2006, p. 2, of MaMkhize, one of Jacob Zuma's most visible and ubiquitous supporters, cardboard ‘machine gun’ in hand, outside the Pietermaritzburg High Court.
21 Vuvuzela, Wits student magazine, front cover headline, 2 March 2007.
22 On the fragmented polity see Ivor Chipkin's Do South Africans Exist?Nationalism, democracy and the identity of ‘the people’ (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 2007).
23 Kofi Agawu has noted: ‘In so far as they constitute complex messages rooted in specific cultural practices, the varieties of African music known to use today may be designated as text.’ ‘African music as text’, Research in African Literatures 32, 2 (2001), p. 8.
24 James Olkawitch, ‘Proverbs and social history’ in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds), The Social History of Language (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987), p. 44.
28 Nathalie Arnold, ‘Placing the shameless: approaching poetry in the politics of Pemban-ness in Zanzibar 1995–2001’, Research in African Literatures 33, 3 (2002), p. 161. On taarab and the Tanzanian national imaginary see Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili music and cultural politics in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2002).
29 See, for instance, Arthur Gribben (ed.), The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, (University of Massachussets Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999).
30 Note, for instance, the interpretation of Yoruba oriki and their role as ‘present’ history in Karin Barber, I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, women and the past in a Yoruba town (Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, Edinburgh, 1991).
31 See Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude, ‘Popular music, popular politics: "Unbwogable" and the idioms of freedom in Kenya popular music’, African Affairs 104, 415 (2005), pp. 225–49.
32 See, for instance, the site <www.hiiraanonline.com>. My thanks to Lidwien Kapteins for discussion on this.
33 See Alec J. C. Pongweni, Songs that Won the Liberation War (The College Press, Harare, 1982).
34 Alec J. C. Pongweni, ‘The chimurenga songs of the Zimbabwean war of liberation’ in Karin Barber (ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture (James Currey, Oxford, 1997), p. 66.
35 See Anne-Marie Gray, ‘The liberation songs: an important voice of black South Africans from 1912–1994’, Journal of Education 33 (2004), pp. 86–101.
36 See Gray, ibid., for an account of this.
37 See Gray, ibid., pp. 95ff. Mini was hanged together with Wilson Khayinga and Zinakile Mkaba. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuyisile Mini>. For Mini's obituary, see ‘South African freedom songs: a tribute to patriot Vuyisile Mini’, African Communist 20 (January–March 1965), pp. 15–18, with a note by Mini, ‘From the death cell’ p. 18. For a biography of Mini see <www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/misc/mini.html>. See also G. M. Gerhart and T. Karis (eds), From Protest to Challenge: A documentary history of politics in South Africa 1882–1964, Vol. 4, Political Profiles 1882–1964 (Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, CA, 1977), p. 89. For an account of the singing on the Women's March see Helen Joseph, Side by Side: The autobiography of Helen Joseph (Zed Books, London, 1986).
38 Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, popular music and politics in South Africa (Continuum, London, 2004), pp. 113–14.
39 See Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ‘Painting in Zaire’ in Barber (ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture, p. 103. Jewsiewicki discusses the ideology of authenticity in Zaire's Second Republic, 1968–90, in relation to popular painting and its themes.
40 See Anne-Marie Gray, ‘The liberation songs’.
41 Now O. R. Tambo International Airport.
42 Thanks to Mpume Zondi for her help with translating this.
43 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977).
44 See the searching article by Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘"I am the New Man and you are the New Woman"’: the iconography of the guerrilla in some recent Zimbabwean poetry’, English Academy Review 3 (1986), pp. 51–63.
45 Pongweni, ‘Chimurenga songs’, p. 66.
46 Preben Kaarsholm, ‘Mental colonisation or catharsis? Theatre, democracy and cultural struggle from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe’, in Liz Gunner (ed.), Politics and Performance: Theatre, poetry and song in Southern Africa (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1994), p. 230.
48 See Shirli Gilbert, ‘Singing against apartheid: ANC cultural groups and the international anti-apartheid struggle’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33, 2 (June 2007), pp. 421–41.
49 The following information on ‘Umshini Wami’ was given to me by Steve Davis, who has been researching Radio Freedom and has interviewed a number of MK veterans. My grateful thanks to Steve Davis and the two MK veterans to whom he spoke on this occasion. I have not included their names for reasons of confidentiality. The details that follow were in a conversation between those two anonymous veterans and Steve Davis. The interpretation is my own.
50 The origin of the fierce toyitoyi dance is disputed. Wally Serote has stated that it came from the war dances some South African cadres saw and took part in in Libya. Personal communication, 21 August 1990, London. Anne Marie Gray refers to a video she viewed at the Mayibuye Centre, in which Dali Tambo folded it into a far longer, centuries-old ‘tradition of black South Africans’. Gray, ‘Liberation songs’, p. 98. Both could be correct.
51 The former MK soldiers, now MK veterans, interviewed by Steve Davis.
52 This point is made by one of the former MK fighters whom Steve Davis interviewed.
53 See Anne McClintock's ‘"No longer in a future heaven": women and nationalism in South Africa’, Transition 51 (1991), pp. 104–25.
54 Shireen Hassim, Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting authority (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2006), p. 114.
55 See McClintock, ‘No longer’; also Nira Yuval-Davis and Flora Anthias (eds), Women – Nation – State (Macmillan, London, 1992), pp. 1–15; Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Identity and its discontents: women and the nation’, Millenium: Journal of International Studies 20, 3 (1991), pp. 1–15.
56 Hassim, Women's Organizations.
57 Maurice Bloch, Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society (Academic Press, London, 1975); Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An introduction (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1975).
58 See Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Melancholia of freedom: humour and nostalgia among Indians in South Africa’ in Modern Drama 48, 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 297–315.
59 The CD and cassette came out under their own imprint, Izingane ZoMa Record Company, MCING 125 (DD) (2006) and is distributed by Gallo.
60 Maskandi or maskanda singers, from the Afrikaans musikant, represent a genre of popular music which draws on ‘tradition’ for its lyrics and stances on the world and on the modern, but cannot by any means be seen as ‘traditional’ in any imprisoning sense. Rather, it exploits tradition and works within the modern. See Noeleen Davies, ‘The guitar in Zulu maskanda tradition’, World of Music 36, 2 (2004), pp. 118–37, reproduced as ‘The guitar in maskanda tradition’ in Christine Lucia (ed.), The World of South African Music (Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2005), pp. 207–15. Collins, ‘Constructing maskanda’, is particularly emphatic about the voice of maskanda musicians as the dynamic music of the creative and marginalized. A similar point is made by Clegg in his 1981 paper, ‘The music of Zulu immigrant workers’.
61 Mfaz’ Omnyama (Black Woman – the name of one of his songs) and Phuzekhemisi (Drinker at the Chemist's) use(d) isiZulu as their chosen language of song but I think their appeal reaches far beyond mother-tongue speakers because of their social message and the aesthetic appeal of their guitar work and song style. On maskanda style, creativity, memory, and present dissent see Collins, ‘Constructing maskanda’.
62 See Thabo Manyathi, ‘Let the Zuma song be aired’, Natal Witness, 2 March 2006, p. 10, <www.witness.co.za>.
65 On the related mbaqanga popular form and the electronic making of a particular ‘sound’, see Meintjes, Sound of Africa.
66 See Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 100.
68 Ibid. My thanks to Mpume Zondi for information on the taxi drivers and music outside the Supreme Court. Also to Dudu and Khulekani Ngubane for discussion of the ‘Msholozi’ song and teaching me about omaskandi ‘ngomlomo wabo’.
69 For two recent accounts of the knotty relationship of music and politics in other African countries see Maina Mutonya, ‘Praise and protest: music and contesting patriotisms in postcolonial Kenya’, Social Dynamics 30, 2 (2004), pp. 20–35; and Silindiwe Sibanda, ‘"You don't get to sing a song when you have nothing to say": Oliver Mutukudzi's music as a vehicle for socio-political commentary’, Social Dynamics 30, 2 (2004), pp. 36–63.
70 As Veit Erlmann has pointed out, social comment has always been an intrinsic feature of mbube, isicathamiya music. See in particular Erlmann, Nightsong.
71 Karin Barber, ‘Introduction’ in Karin Barber (ed.), Readings in African Popular Culture (James Currey, Oxford, 1997), pp. 1–11.
72 One of the most recent accounts is by David Coplan in his essay, ‘God rock Africa: thoughts on politics in popular black performance in South Africa’, African Studies 64, 1 (2005), pp. 9–28; see also the second edition of Coplan's In Township Tonight (Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL, 2008).
73 ‘We may take undesirable action: MK veterans’, Cape Argus, 20 April 2008, p. 12.
74 See Gideon Burrows, Kalashnikov. AK47 (New Internationalist, Trigger Issues Series, Oxford, 2006).
75 Quoted in Andile Mngxitama, ‘"We are not all like that": the monster bares its fangs’ in Shireen Hassim, Tawana Kupe, and Eric Worby (eds), Go Home or Die Here: Violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference (Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 2008), pp. 189–208. On the xenophobic riots and the sites of despair from which they emanated see also Richard Pithouse, ‘The pogroms in South Africa’, the new black magazine (July 2008), <http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?9ndex=1473>.
76 Holy Cross Church is near Nelson Mandela's old home, also that of Desmond Tutu and the late Walter Sisulu. It adjoins the Hector Peterson Memorial and was the centre of much opposition to the old order as well as being a place of worship.
77 The cultural field in which it sits could through a line of flight nest with another unruly song of the outsider, the ‘De la Rey’ song by Bok van Blerk, which was banned from rugby matches in 2007 but surfaced in such unlikely sites as school disputes where race was a site of contestation. See ‘Row over religion erupts at high school. Pupils chant Afrikaans hit song De la Rey to protest principal's appointment’. The Sunday Times (Johannesburg), 24 February 2008, <www.thetimes.co.za>. My thanks to Pippa Stein for the reference.
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