David B. Coplan

God rock Africa: Thoughts on politics in popular black performance in South Africa

This article is simply a personal reflection, after three decades of “participantobservation” on what has happened to both the idea and the expression of the political imagination in the popular music of black South African youth in the time of freedom. “Post-apartheid era” is the accepted standard phrase, but I thought it might be less wearisome if I did not try to hold up my affective trousers with the “A word” (even if, like an unpaid bill, it is supposed to be in the post) from the start. Thanks to our people, great and small, we are today enjoying more than just “post-apartheid” in South Africa. Yet we must not, at the same time, forget how dire was the repression of the performing arts here not so long ago, nor the dogged, ultimately successful struggle by performers to overcome it; a situation powerfully described in Gwen Ansell’s recent volume, Soweto Blues (Ansell 2004:109–177). Indeed, the political premise from which many of the most talented and committed artists of that time proceeded is summarised in a comment by South Africa’s most distinguished stage actor and theatrical personality, John Kani. As Kani observed in an interview in the dark days of 1975, black performing artists could be thankful for apartheid, because it produced

Introduction: from Empiricism to Theory in African Border Studies

This special issue represents a small milestone in the crossing of Africa into the sovereign territory of border studies. In June 2007, a first step in this direction was taken at the workshop on “African Borderlands Research: Emerging Agendas and Critical Reflections” at the African Studies Centre of the University of Edinburgh. There, the “African Borderland Research Network” ABORNE (www.aborne.org) was founded by fifteen participants as an interdisciplinary network of European, American and African scholars who seek to integrate history, anthropology, development, migration, and refugee studies in a broad field of African border research. The publication of this set of articles by ABORNE members in such a distinguished journal in the field represents both a recognition and a product of progress since then.

First meets third: Analyzing inequality along the US‐Mexico and South Africa‐Lesotho borders

Abstract The literature of the US‐Mexico borderlands constitutes a cross‐disciplinary theoretical platform for border studies as a field. In border studies elsewhere, however, very few scholars have carried their investigations beyond their “own” chosen borderland. Viewing the matter from the margin of Africas deepest South, however, the centrality of the US southwest provides an unavoidable comparative challenge that must be faced. Still, a comparative analysis of international borderlands as separate in space and situation as US‐Mexico and South Africa‐Lesotho may appear to be fetched from far too far. In response the paper bases its argument on the reality that a crucial analytical variable, inequity, is present in both cases: The US‐Mexico and SA‐Lesotho borders are two of the only borders in the world where vastly different levels of development meet. If, hinged on this variable, the door to comparison of two such distant and different borderlands can be opened, then quite possibly some generalisations, both small and large, might be admitted into border theory. This paper marks an initial attempt to both to advance African border theory at the ethnological level, and to link border studies in Africa with the established and critical heartland of border studies.

People of the Early Caledon River Frontier and Their Encounters

Abstract When the early white settlers began crossing the Orange River during the early nineteenth century, they claimed to have found an empty land, and not to have encountered the San (‘Bushman’), Euro-Khoe (‘Bastaard’/Griqua and Koranna) and Bantu-speaking (Batswana and Basotho) inhabitants of the country. This was not at all so, and the undeniability of the encounter was soon made patent by the violent but sometimes collaborative relations that ensued. Distinguished South African historians have given us harrowing and pitiless accounts of Khoe-khoe and, more often and more fiercely, San resistance to their dispossession, enslavement, and extirpation by white settlers in Transorangia in the first third of the nineteenth century. Accounts of cooperation and mutually benevolent interaction also exist, though they are far more the exception. This account explores who the Transorangians were and how they perceived and dealt with one another. The ‘identity violence’ practised on the frontier has shaped how they have related until today.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and the Liberation of the Spirit of South Africa1

Footprints of cultural artefacts travel across borderlands and boundaries of multiple inscription, from villages to towns and back again, between territories of the imagination and fetishised, armed and dangerous national states, imprinted in landscapes of experience and practice. Anthropologists and oral historians have recently become fascinated with how rumours, fantastic tales, songs, and images become enshrined in a mobile African popular culture taken for granted by many of those who partake of it. 3 Indeed children’s songs (whether folk, or composed like Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika) have in their resilience played an important role in the indexical transmission of African history. So the demarcation of Basutoland’s colonial borders by the British Resident Major Warden is memorialised in the satirical Basotho children’s verse, Majoro Wardene, Majoro Wardene, Nka thipa ea hao u sehe naha (Major Warden, Major Warden/Take your knife and cut the country). The objects circulating in this mobile popular culture blur the boundaries between sacred and secular, as well as public and private social life. In music, as with other popular arts, the framing of images through lyrics, harmonies, and melodies inscribes historic moments in what Johannes Fabian (1996:226– 277) calls a remembrance of the present. 4 Each rendition of a song is connected to the community or context in which it is performed, imbuing the piece with a distinctive, historically emergent social and political meaning. The hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa), known as the African as well as South African national anthem, occupies a field of such experience and practice at the intersection of public religion and popular culture. Two decades ago, one of us wrote that “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika has come to symbolize more than any other piece of expressive culture the struggle for African unity and liberation in South Africa” (Coplan 1985:46). Yet the song’s popularity extends beyond the borders of South Africa and the confines of the liberation struggle that it so actively

Community acceptability of minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) in children under five years of age in Soweto, South Africa

This interdisciplinary study, using qualitative and ethnographic research methods, collected data from 330 men and women in Soweto, South Africa, in order to understand the community acceptability of minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) in children who died under five years of age. The study found that the acceptability of MIAs depended on people’s socio-cultural belief systems regarding death and afterlife; on power and gender dynamics within households; and on structural issues relating to the health care system and mortuary services.

Erasing History: The Destruction of the Beersheba and Platberg African Christian Communities in the Eastern Orange Free State, 1858–1983

Abstract The white settler Cape Colony and later Republic and Province of the Orange Free State in central South Africa imposed a harsh regime of suppression on the African communities found within their territory. Chieftaincy was largely abolished and independent Bantu, Khoisan, and ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) communities were progressively destroyed and their inhabitants made to work on white farms and in the towns. The only exceptions were the tiny Native Reserves that later became apartheid Bantustans. Such destruction was visited not only upon pre-colonial chieftaincies and villages but equally black Christian mission stations and settlements. This paper documents the systematic destruction of two such communities on the eastern side of the Caledon River Valley on the border with the independent African Kingdom of Lesotho: Beersheba mission station near Smithfield in 1858 and the Platberg location attached to Ladybrand over the period 1968–1983. The tragic drama of these communities’ disappearance illustrates poignantly not simply the pillaging of independent black communities, whether pre-colonial or Christian, but the effective attempt as well to erase them from history. How and why this was done forms the subject of the authors reflective commentary on race and place in rural white-ruled South Africa.