Republic or Death! (37 page)

The task then just became one of cutting away as many lyrics as possible until the anthem hit a reasonable length. (The beautiful chorus of ‘Nkosi' was one of the first things to go, some Muslims – about a quarter of South Africa's Indian population are Muslim – having objected to its references to the Holy Spirit. Surprisingly that caused less debate than some sentences in ‘Die Stem', such as a line about ox wagons ‘Cut[ting] their trails into the earth', which many blacks saw as a reminder of the initial acts of colonialism.) But as everyone was discussing these cuts, Jeanne had one final idea: ‘Why can't we have some words in English?' ‘I just felt there were so many languages in there, but where was my own? So I literally pulled some out of the air. It took me about five minutes during a tea break. I think that shows – they're really very basic, uninteresting words. “Let us live and strive for freedom / In South Africa our land.” It's not very clever, is it?'

A year or so after that meeting, Mandela announced Jeanne's work would be the new anthem, much to the relief of Prince Philip, I imagine, as well as every schoolchild in the country. I ask Jeanne to tell me the most memorable time she's heard it since. She thinks for a while and then, without warning, starts to sob. It seems to take her by surprise as much as it does me. She turns to hide her face and starts rummaging embarrassedly through her handbag, hoping to find a handkerchief, all the while apologising over and over again. ‘This is going to sound so silly,' she says, ‘but it was the first time I heard it on TV. Our TV stations used to stop at midnight and they'd play the anthem. And I was in bed one night, in my little house, and I suddenly heard it and I thought: Wow! This is my work and it's going out to the whole of the country. I did this.' She wipes away some tears. Watching her then, I wonder why anyone would think she wasn't at the centre of the anthem's story.

*

When I arrived in South Africa, I was expecting to end up producing this book's optimistic chapter, about a song that inspired a seventy-year freedom struggle, became part of a composite anthem, and is still helping heal this rainbow nation almost twenty years after that anthem was written. The first few meetings I had did actually suggest that picture would arise. I couldn't get anyone to complain about the song, not even the representatives of Tsonga-and Venda-speakers I spoke to – the only two of South Africa's eleven official languages not represented in some way in the anthem (Ndebele, Tswana, Swati and the Sotho languages are linked to either Xhosa, Zulu or Sesotho). ‘Take it from me – take it from me! – nobody in Venda feels excluded because our language isn't in there,' said Nkhelebeni Phaswana, a linguistics professor and expert in Venda culture, when I asked him if he felt left out. ‘We actually feel more – more! – united with the rest of the country, because everyone across South Africa is now singing the same song.

‘You know Enoch Sontonga's original song is a hymn for Africa?' he added. ‘Well, do you think he should have written it in hundreds of languages so that everyone in the continent felt included? Are you mad? What's important about a song is its message, not the language the message is in. We in Venda sang his song long before the end of apartheid and we'll keep on doing so for a long time to come.'

Plenty of others agreed just as strongly about the impact of the anthem. Most laughed that they did not know all the words, but they said that didn't matter. Johan de Villiers, Marthinus de Villiers's grandson, said he felt the anthem was the greatest ‘conciliatory gesture' Mandela ever made. ‘The emotional impact of keeping “Die Stem” is larger than anyone realises,' he said. ‘Just with that, he won over the hearts of so many, many people he might not have done otherwise.'

I questioned him on this: surely whites weren't that averse to singing ‘Nkosi' alone? It's hardly the most controversial song, what with its gently religious lyrics. But he put me straight, giggling his way through a story about when he formed a multiracial choir in the late 1980s. ‘White people would phone our house and shout at me, “What would your grandfather say? He composed ‘Die Stem'!” And I used to say, “He'd be delighted!”'

Edward Griffiths, the man who was in charge of South African rugby during the 1990s and forced the national team to learn ‘Nkosi' before they hosted the 1995 World Cup (one of the great unifying post-apartheid events – the Springboks fans seeming to have lost some of their Boer nationalism of a few years earlier), said he thought the anthem wasn't just a success in South Africa but was proving influential abroad. ‘New Zealand appear to have copied it – they now sing a verse of their anthem in Maori before a verse in English,' he said, ‘and I dare say soon we'll have an Australian anthem with some lines of an Aboriginal language. It's been a really positive thing.'

However, after I spent slightly longer in the country, I realised my optimism about the song was somewhat misplaced. People started pointing me in the direction of the Economic Freedom Fighters, the country's third-largest political party, who have asked for ‘Die Stem' to be dropped from the anthem unless ‘it can be scientifically confirmed that its inclusion brings social cohesion'. ‘Die Stem' was ‘a musical … commitment to kill and die for the white supremacist state', its statements on the issue say. ‘If languages were the issue, why couldn't there have been another Afrikaans song included to create a multilingual anthem?' Others pointed me towards Steve Hofmeyr, an Afrikaner pop star who still sings ‘Die Stem' as if he were living in the 1950s and, by doing so, has angered more blacks than you would think possible. I initially dismissed both of them as extremists, but then I started speaking to more people about the anthem – friendly, everyday people you can't dismiss so easily – and realised just how widespread disappointment with it is.

In Melville, Johannesburg's trendy middle-class haven, a place filled with signs warning passers-by that armed response units patrol the area, Zethu Mashika, a film composer, told me, ‘I feel so uncomfortable when I get to the part in Afrikaans, it's like something's crawling under my skin. We should just sing “Nkosi”, or some completely different song.'

Another day I had a drink with Mondli Makhanya, an ever-laughing, middle-aged newspaper columnist. ‘The anthem's not the progressive nation-building thing Nelson Mandela believed it was,' he said. ‘All it's done is give the Afrikaners something to hold on to, a celebration of them-ness, and you see that every time there's a rugby game. When they get to the “Die Stem” part it's like the roof of the stadium blows off. Literally. There'll be some singing of the “Nkosi” parts, by the young people and the English-speaking whites who did not necessarily identify with “Die Stem” back in the day, but there's still this hard core and when they get to that part, they let their feelings [be] known.' He smiled awkwardly as if trying to decide whether to voice the thought that had just come into his head. ‘I can never forgive Mandela for this – and he's the man who embodies forgiveness!'

Again, and again, from person after person, I heard comments just like those. And it wasn't just blacks I met who felt uncomfortable with the anthem – I met many whites and coloured people too who agreed with them, who said there were still too many divides in the country and that perhaps it was better to create a new anthem that transcended history rather than acted as a continual reminder of it. Even Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, the anthem's composer, who insisted it was uniting many people, said she ‘half agreed' with complaints about it. ‘It would be nice to have something completely new and ours,' she said, ‘although don't ask me who'd compose it.'

*

‘Argh, you've just been speaking with the wrong people,' says Lolla Meyer, a blonde, curly-haired thirty-something in a vampish red dress and equally vampish red lipstick, who's meant to be teaching me Afrikaans, the final language of the anthem I've got to learn. ‘I've got lots of black students – Zulu-speakers, Ndebele-, Tswana-speakers – and they all love it. They know the past, but we just make a joke about that. Like today, I was teaching some the imperative, and our textbooks are from the eighties as no one's written a new one for so long, so all the sentences were things like “Stand to attention!” and “Go fetch my suitcase!” And we were all just laughing. I mean, “Go fetch my suitcase”? It's ridiculous. But that was the past; you can't ignore it.'

It's coming to the end of my time in South Africa and, as Lolla speaks, I allow myself to hope that maybe she's right – maybe I have just been talking to the wrong people and there are a whole host of black people out there who do love the anthem, even the Afrikaans lines. It helps that she's also making me wonder if it'd even be possible to change the anthem in the way many would like by just having ‘Nkosi' and forgetting the rest. ‘How would I feel if they cut out the Afrikaans?' she asks. ‘Very pissed off,
ja
. But everyone would keep singing “Die Stem” anyway. There's enough people who're still proud of Afrikaans. Go to Pretoria. If you told half the people there they'd never be able to speak Afrikaans again, there'd be a war. It'd be the same if you went and told people in the Eastern Cape they can't speak Zulu.' She pulls out a sheet of paper and shows me the breakdown of the country's languages. There's Zulu at the top, 22.7 per cent of the population's first language. Xhosa comes in second at 16 per cent, then it's Afrikaans at 13.5 per cent. You can't take any of the languages away is her point. If you changed the anthem, you'd have to keep Afrikaans in somehow and if people objected, well, tough.

She starts telling me more about Afrikaans, its history, its use and unique characteristics – from swearing (‘
Voetsak!
') to more swearing (‘
Fukof!
') – as if trying to convince me it's the best language here and I should be on its side. She's funny and interesting during all of this, but then she starts saying Afrikaans is also an ‘incredibly sexy language – you can have great pillow talk in it' and I realise things have gone a little too far. Lolla's clearly decided I'm gullible, that she can say anything about this language and I'll believe her. I mean, I've been in South Africa two weeks, I know as well as anyone that Afrikaans is a language that occasionally sounds like it's spoken with a particularly viscous piece of phlegm stuck in your throat. Don't tell me straight-faced it's sexy.

I decide to draw our chat to a close and say that perhaps it's best we get on with the lesson I'm paying for, so she starts to teach me the anthem's four lines of Afrikaans. The first two are easy enough:

Uit die blou van onse hemel,

Uit die diepte van ons see
.

You just say what you see with a slight Dutch accent. But then we get to the last two – ‘
Oor ons ewige gebergtes, / Waar die kranse antwoord gee
' – and I come to an appalling stop. It's the ‘ge' sounds that are the problem. They're meant to be guttural, almost like you're rolling your r's, and I can't do it no matter how much I try.

Lolla just smiles, tells me not to worry and says there is an easy way to learn. ‘Just watch my lips,' she says, and I stare at her mouth as she says each word slowly, her tongue fluttering up and down between her bright red lips. ‘Er, wig, ge, ge, berg, tes,' she says, breaking down the two hardest words, each syllable practically purring out of her mouth. I sit there silent for a moment, not sure how to react because dear God, this is almost, dare I say it, genuinely, yes, sexy … No, no, no, I tell myself, shaking my head clear. This can't be happening. She does it once more, then asks me to give it a go. ‘Eurghweegergh gerhjblerghterghs,' I gargle, several flecks of spit flying out of my mouth in her direction and abruptly, thankfully, killing the mood. ‘Er, yes, perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about your pronunciation for now,' she says. ‘Let's just try and get through to the end.'

*

The problem with researching an anthem like South Africa's is you're always looking for straight answers – either it's one that did inspire a freedom struggle and still is inspiring people today, or it's one that desperately needs changing. But after meeting Lolla, I came to the realisation that in South Africa things are just never going to be that simple. It's a messy country where awkward associations are a part of daily life – but that doesn't stop it being one of the most enthralling and uplifting places you can visit. It's the same with the anthem – it's a messy answer to a messy problem and some people are always going to be happy with it, others always uncomfortable. It can be both one of the world's great songs and one of the most overhyped at the same time, surely? But deep down I still wanted to come down on the optimistic side, as much because there seems to be so little positivity among anthems today as anything else, which was why I felt grateful every time I met someone who still genuinely believed in the song, and especially when I met Wally Serote, South Africa's original angry young poet.

In the 1960s, Wally was locked up for nine months in solitary confinement for his work trying to resuscitate the ANC (it had suffered after being banned, with many of its leaders jailed and many young people turning to the more radical, also banned, Pan Africanist Congress). ‘They said I was a terrorist,' he told me, ‘that I had the intentions of participating in a conflict. And they weren't wrong, really, because I did. All the training I went through, I felt, was preparing me for that. The ANC had no plans for it, but it would have been very irresponsible of someone to have given me a gun back then because I would have used it.' After being released from prison, he moved to America to study and – much to the relief of the ANC, I expect – channelled his indignation into poetry, churning out angry, ominous work after angry, ominous work (‘I do not know where I've been,' goes one, ‘but brother, / I know I am coming, / I come like a tide of water'). Within a few years, he was back working for the organisation in exile in Botswana, part of both its arts programmes and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), although his strongest memory of this time was learning ‘the principles of non-racialism' from those around him. ‘I would have been a racist myself if it were not for how the ANC educated me,' he told me at one point, as if to emphasise just how much anger he had within him at that time.