In past years there have been many instances of musical encounters which may contribute to alleviating current fears and anxieties about members of
“other” groups’ “customs”. Jazz, as always, has been in the forefront of broad collaborations. After the demise of Moses Taiwa Molelekwa and Zim Ngqawana, other musicians, such as Shane Cooper, Carlo Mombelli, Kesivan Naidoo, Selaelo Selota, Kyle Shepherd, Dan Shout, Marcus Wyatt and Sisonke Xonti, to name but a few, kept the colour-blind creative traditions of South African jazz alive.
Following up on new mixes inaugurated by Mango Groove, Freshly Ground proposed attractive pop fusions. MCs (i.e. rappers) of various backgrounds are associated in rap. Kwaito17 fans can be increasingly counted among coloured and white South Africans; recently a white writer and singer, camouflaged behind the sobriquet Craigieji Makhosi, launched “Quite a White Ou” (Quite a White Guy), a humoristic kwaito song aiming at making “people aware of the enormous gap between the European and African cultures within South Africa”.18 The South African College of Music’s Opera School at the University of Cape Town trained in a few years talented young singers who perform in South Africa and
abroad; symphony orchestras and chamber music ensembles, such as the Odeion Quartet,19 based at the University of the Free State, now comprise noticeable numbers of black African, coloured and Indian instrumentalists.
A moppie20 presented during the 2008 Klopse Carnival told a fable which showed that representations of others were beginning to change. In November 2007, Kaapse Klopse are busy practicing the various items they will enter in the 2008 carnival competitions. In Netreg Road, not very far from the railway line which edges the township of Bonteheuwel,21 the Netreg Superstars are rehearsing a moppie. Gathered in a shelter erected in front of a small house, isolated from the street by pieces of plywood and plastic sheets, covered with a tarpaulin, 20 to 30 singers (mostly men, some quite young) read on a carton board hanging from the wall the words they have to memorise. They are supported by a backtrack, on which the accompaniment of the song has been recorded. The coach organises the voices according to their range, indicates nuances that must be respected, and emphasises where the song must gain momentum. The singers have no musical training whatsoever; they do not read music, but they have good voices and display an acute musicality. They are lucky to work with an outstanding coach, Terry Hector. He used to play and sing in Taliep Petersen and David Kramer’s musicals, and featured in particular in District Six, The Musical.22 He is not only a remarkable comedian and singer, but also a clever composer of moppies. For the 2008 Klopse carnival, he prepared an original song titled “Vusie van Guguletu”.23 The hero of the story is a black African named Vusie, who came from Soweto to live in Gugulethu, a black African township, about three kilometres from Netreg. One day, he passes by the Klopskamer of a carnival troupe and hears them rehearsing a moppie. He is quite fascinated, comes in and asks if he can join them. The singers are a bit surprised, but accept and when Vusie starts singing, they discover that he has a fine operatic voice. He sings “like Pavarotti”, and they find him duidelik, which usually means clear, understandable, crystalline, but can be understood here as very nice and refined. Vusie is integrated into the choir; he learns how to sing moppies, but in the process also influences his fellow singers to the extent that, eventually, their style changes: They sound “opera” and have, together with Vusie, invented an “opera moppie”.
“Vusie van Guguletu” is obviously a parable, but as such it reveals ongoing mutations in representations which the different “population groups” categorised by apartheid entertain about each other. It suggests that music can help overcome prejudices and divisions, can contribute to leaving behind forgetting — forgetting of commonalities, of shared histories — and become an instrument of reminiscing that may lead to recognising. For a long time, in order to prevent a union of all victims of racism and apartheid against successive governments, the strategy of divide and rule implemented by the authorities instilled in the minds of coloureds a fear of black Africans, of “kaffirs”.24 Coloureds were made to believe that, although inferior to whites, they were superior to black Africans. Zimitri Erasmus
recalled for instance: “For me, growing up coloured meant knowing that I was not only not white, but less than white; not only not black, but better than black (as we referred to African people)” (Erasmus 2001: 13; italics in the original). Similarly, black Africans were taught to despise coloureds, who were presented as people without history and culture, and as drunkards lacking education, sometimes called amalawu.25 Bradley van Sitters, an activist fighting “mental enslavement”
who claims to be “a proud Khoikhoi (man par excellence)” explained: “Growing up on the Cape Flats of South Africa, I was mistakenly stereotyped a ‘amalawu’, a Xhosa term roughly depicting people with no culture and no language of their own, the bastard children of Jan van Riebeeck […]”.26
“Vusie van Gugulethu” is just a fable which can be considered as a portent of changes to come, but cannot be treated as evidence that a complete transformation of representations has already taken place. Other examples nevertheless confirm that music is a terrain on which encounters may open a way to recognising. In Cape Town, choirs led by Phumelele Tsewu (Fezeka High School Choir, then iGugu Le Kapa [Pride27 of Cape Town]) illustrate how various musical repertoires can be made to converge. They do not only sing arrangements of rural orally transmitted songs from Transkei and works by black South African composers, they also interpret moppies and Afrikaans songs. Singers, most of whom were born in underprivileged neighbourhoods, are filled with pride when they are acclaimed in concert halls after performing, in their own way, the diversity of South African choir music. Recently, they have collaborated with another choral group presenting Klopse and Malay Choirs’ repertoires, the Cape Traditional Singers led by Anwar Gambeno. iGugu Le Kapa and the Cape Traditional Singers appeared in concerts where they first sung on their own, then joined voices to perform pieces drawn from their respective repertoires. The finale in which the two choirs intermingled appeared undoubtedly as a moment of great rejoicing, a time of recognising. However, it must be noted that these concerts did not take place in South Africa, but in France and the Netherlands.28
What does take place in Cape Town is the development of the Rosa Choir29. The choir was initiated by members of the Cape Cultural Collective, a group of poets, musicians and artists (most of them former anti-apartheid activists) dedicated to developing artistic creativity across the borders of the former “population groups”.30 They discovered that a translation of the emblematic nederlandsliedjie
“Rosa”31 existed in isiXhosa (Desai 2004) and realised that songs loved by black Africans, coloureds and whites could be translated and jointly sung by a group representative of the Western Cape’s demographics. The collective decided to form a choir able to transcend “historical divides” and soon got support from the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. They intended to combine “different cultural traditions in a project that is entertaining, transformative, inspirational and educational”. They also emphasised that: “The project is about much more than just singing. It is about friendship, respect, tolerance, understanding and affirming the value of each person.”32
Journalist Warren Fortune wrote that, according to Mansoor Jaffer, one of the co-founders of the Cape Cultural Collective, “the choir was creating a form of cultural integration that had the potential to destroy persistent apartheid ideologies”. Mansoor Jaffer explained: “We want to break down the barriers of the past, the mental and physical restrictions that apartheid exposed to us.”33 The choir is diverse in terms of the origins and musical backgrounds of its members, who sing in the three most spoken languages of the Western Cape: Afrikaans, isiXhosa and English. The Rosa Choir regularly performs and a Junior Rosa Choir has recently been formed.