Republic or Death! (36 page)

In the sunglow of our summer,

In our winter night's cold,

In the spring of our love,

In the autumn of our sorrow

…

We always say yes,

To live, to die

[In] South Africa.

Cornelis wrote the first three verses on the evening of 30 May 1918 while sitting at his kitchen table. He wrote it powered by so much coffee he knew full well the only chance he'd have of getting to sleep afterwards was with drink. A few days later, his head and liver recovered, he sent the verses to his mistress (also his assistant) with some music he'd written attached. ‘You will likely think this is damn little,' he wrote, ‘but we have to plod on until one day we have an anthem [since our] musicians and poets have otherwise conspired to be silent.' He asked her to get it printed in the leading Afrikaans newspaper. ‘Let it appear in this shape and then somebody can replace the music with something better, and once they've done that, somebody else can find better words.'

*

Contrary to his expectations, Cornelis's efforts couldn't have been better received – people wrote letters from all over the Cape praising them. Here was a song that perfectly summed up their feelings for the land, and their desire to be free of all vestiges of past British rule. Their only complaint about the words seemed to be that there weren't enough of them, and people begged Cornelis to add a fourth verse expressing their love for the Lord as well as country. They weren't so keen on the music, though, which, yes, was amateurish. Several composers soon tried to improve it, but Cornelis didn't like any of their efforts.

Only one of them persisted, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, Marthinus Lourens de Villiers. Marthinus is a far easier character to like than Cornelis. He was an eccentric who walked around the towns where he lived in a pith helmet, hitting golf balls for children to collect. He also invited coloureds into his church services, despite the whites frowning upon it. He didn't actually really want to be a minister – he was a frustrated musician who had only entered the Church to please his parents, who had promised God that he would do so after he miraculously recovered from a childhood bout of measles. One day in 1920, Marthinus was supposed to be occupied writing a baptism certificate, but he showed his true calling by suddenly shouting at his wife to come to him. ‘I've got it! I've got it!' he's meant to have cried as he rushed to his piano. ‘
Uit die blou van ONSE HEMEL
,' he then sang as he played, raising the song's melody to reach the blue heavens of the sky; ‘
Uit die diepte van ONS SEE
,' he went on, dropping it to hit the depths of the oceans, and then he carried on, simply letting Cornelis's words guide his tune wherever it needed to go.

*

‘Die Stem', once Cornelis had given his approval to Marthinus's music, was immediately sung by whites throughout the country as if it were South Africa's anthem, but it didn't become the official one until 1957, when the government threw out ‘God Save the Queen' and the country's last remaining symbolic links to Britain with it. After that, it was everywhere – played before sports games and at cinema screenings; in schools and at political rallies. At the Currie Cup final, the largest rugby – and so sporting – event in the country, a white-gloved bandleader used to turn to the main stand and conduct the spectators through it, the crowd singing so loudly there was no point his band joining in. Surprisingly, given all that, the song's name doesn't appear much in the history of apartheid. There aren't tales of South African Defence Force soldiers singing it gloatingly at blacks; the government didn't even force non-whites to learn it in schools. In fact, the one major appearance it does make in South African history occurred after apartheid ended and Mandela had been released.

On 15 August 1992, South Africa was due to play New Zealand at rugby, which would mark the end of a sixteen-year international sporting embargo against the country. It was a day the white population had been longing for – most Afrikaners loving nothing more than sport and feeling that their national rugby team, the Springboks, epitomised everything about them: strong, unrelenting, unbeatable. Giving the match the go-ahead was a remarkable reconciliatory gesture by the ANC, but they only agreed to it on the understanding that none of apartheid's symbols would be used. That included ‘Die Stem'. The anthem would not be played, the ANC said; instead there would be a minute's silence ‘in support of domestic peace'.

Unfortunately, some Springboks fans didn't take too well to that news. They wrote to newspapers threatening to turn up with ghetto blasters to play the anthem themselves if it were banned, not seeming to realise or care that by doing so they would be pissing on the spirit of reconciliation that had led to apartheid ending without a civil war. Some papers fanned these flames; the editor of
Die Burger
, the largest Afrikaans newspaper, announced that the ANC didn't seem to ‘have an inkling of the raw emotions they are touching among whites'. Everyone hoped it was simply bluster, but on the day some people did indeed walk into the stadium carrying bulky ghetto blasters, others clutching the country's orange, white and blue, soon-to-be-replaced, flag. When the minute's silence came, the stadium launched into ‘Die Stem' a cappella. They sang it through once, they sang it through again, and then, apparently to calm everyone down, the music was played over the stadium's speakers, so everyone got to sing it once more. ‘As much as I can't stop the ANC from marching or singing what they wish to sing, they must give me the same right,' said Louis Luyt, the president of the Transvaal Rugby Football Union, and the man who apparently gave the all-clear to hit play. The incident somehow didn't cause much trouble – perhaps due to the fact there were few non-whites in the stadium to witness it, maybe more because the South African Rugby Football Union rushed to issue an apology, promising it would never happen again.

The climax of the story of South Africa's anthem should, of course, be the event that is the climax of every story about South Africa: Mandela's inauguration in 1994 as the country's first post-apartheid president. It was on that day that the new anthem was unveiled, after all. Well, new
anthems
, plural, would be a better term – during negotiations over the country's future, it had been decided to keep playing ‘Die Stem', but to immediately follow it with both ‘Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' and then its Sesotho-language version, ‘Morena Boloka', creating the world's first three-in-one anthem. Mandela was the driving force behind that decision. The rest of the ANC's leadership had pushed for ‘Die Stem' to be treated like every other legacy of apartheid, but at a meeting Mandela scolded them: ‘This song that you treat so easily holds the emotions of many people you don't represent yet. With the stroke of a pen you would take a decision to destroy the very – the only! – basis that we are building upon: reconciliation.' Mandela got his wish a few weeks later when he became president, getting the chance to stand hand on heart, face serious and taut, through all three songs. Mandela's happiness with the outcome is seen in his autobiography
, Long Walk to Freedom
. The playing of the anthems is almost the last thing he mentions in it. ‘The day was symbolised for me by the playing of our anthem,' he writes. ‘Although neither group knew the lyrics … they once despised, they would soon … by heart.'

But if that was where the anthem's story ended, I wouldn't have chosen to write about it at all, because what was unveiled that day wasn't an anthem that could really unify anyone – it was an endurance test. The playing of the three songs took five minutes and four seconds. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, joked afterwards that he'd had to remove his hat for so long during them he'd got sunburn. It was clear to anyone impartial watching on TV that the decision was a disaster – not just because of the length of time it took to get through this tripartite anthem, but because of the fact you'd need weeks of rehearsals and language lessons if you were going to even try singing it. If, say, you were an Indian South African from Durban, who only spoke English and Zulu, you suddenly found yourself having to learn twelve lines of Afrikaans and an equal number in Sesotho. If you were a coloured from Cape Town who only spoke Afrikaans and English, you had a similar problem with the Sesotho, and also had to deal with thirteen lines of Xhosa and Zulu. If you were a black from Limpopo in the north who only spoke Venda, well, you'd probably be better off just giving up (an unlikely situation, admittedly).

Renditions soon became farcical, people mumbling their way through the songs, or just entirely ignoring the ones they didn't know. Mandela initially didn't seem to think the complaints were justified, and at ANC meetings he used to act like a disappointed father who knew better than his children and would force the anthems to be replayed again and again until everyone joined in. But after a few months even he began to admit it was ‘quite embarrassing to have people standing for such a long time' and that he was left as much ‘bored' as inspired. It was then he had his real anthem masterstroke: he decided he wasn't the man to come up with a solution after all, formed a committee and got them to sort it out.

*

Sitting in her office at the music department of Wits University in Johannesburg, Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph doesn't exactly look like your typical post-apartheid hero. She's not black, for a start. She's not coloured or Indian either. She's a sixty-something Jewish woman, with bouffant hair and a love of pearl necklaces, someone who looks more like they should be showing visitors around a stately home than songwriting for a nation. I'm not the first person to leap to the wrong conclusion about her. In 1997, when her anthem was unveiled, most newspapers chose to ignore her role in creating the song and instead attributed it mainly to the chairman of the anthem committee, a black language professor and composer, James Khumalo. It's something she's clearly all too aware of, which I think explains why she spends the start of our meeting pulling out page after page of proof that it is indeed mainly her work. ‘Look, here's a letter from the Ministry of Culture thanking me for writing it,' she says at one point. ‘And here's a receipt showing how much I was paid. The grand sum of 3,350 rand [£190]! Can you believe that? If only we'd met at my house then I could show you this plaque I was given for it.'

Jeanne was actually one of the first people Mandela's government called to be on the committee to sort out the anthem, simply because she was one of the few musicians in South Africa capable of working with both African spiritual and Western classical music. She grew up in Pretoria, where her father ran a men's outfitting shop. Being Jewish, she quickly started to feel very uncomfortable with the apartheid system – ‘I knew what prejudice means, let's put it that way' – but she was also helpless to do anything about it. ‘I remember my brother and I cycling one day and we saw these police beating up these black men for no rhyme or reason, probably because they didn't have their passbook or something. And I'd often come home after seeing things like that, in tears, and say to my parents, “What can we do?” and my mother would just say, “There's nothing we can do. The government's too strong.”' Jeanne's own early efforts to combat apartheid tended towards the whimsical, such as trying to get the family's maid to eat with them, much to the maid's horror.

However, as Jeanne grew up and she realised that she wanted to be a composer, the idea came to her that she could use music to fight the system in her own small way. It helped that she had become obsessed with African rhythms and was determined to use them in her work. ‘When I was about eighteen, I started going out to a platinum mine to record the men playing on Sundays,' she says. ‘Fifteen, twenty thousand men might be there at a time. And my mum used to beg me not to go because there were protests and riots – “Please don't, you'll be attacked” – but I really enjoyed it; they had the most incredible orchestra of xylophones and
mbilas
with ankle beads and drums and shakers. A lot of them were from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, not just here, and there was such virtuosity and speed. I think the miners thought I was a little bit mad. “What does this young white girl want to record our songs for?” But they were quite happy for me to be there and listen.'

For the next twenty or so years, Jeanne tried to make a distinctly South African classical music, although she jokes about whether she got anywhere near succeeding. ‘In the seventies, I studied for a while under [Hungarian composer György] Ligeti, and I went through a phase of writing very unlistenable and avant-garde music, so the African feel may not have been so noticeable back then,' she laughs. This didn't apparently put off the people who mattered.

It was February 1995 when the anthem committee had its first meeting, squeezed around a boardroom table in an ‘exceedingly bland' government building in the middle of Pretoria. ‘The instruction was that we couldn't just do anything we wanted. We had to use the existing anthems,' Jeanne says. ‘That was Mandela's wish. Don't scrap anything, be inclusive.' As the meeting started, several people put forward suggestions of what approach to take. The idea that gained the most backing was that the anthem should start with ‘Die Stem' before moving into ‘Nkosi', an idea that clearly wouldn't have worked as it would have given the impression that, musically at least, non-whites were still second-class citizens in the country. Jeanne realised she had to speak up. If this was going to be an anthem for a new, reconciled country, ‘Nkosi' should be first, ‘Die Stem' second, she insisted. You could bridge the change in pitch between the two by getting people to sing the words ‘South Africa', she added. She made it all sound easy, more like joining a child's building blocks together than songwriting, and everyone went for it.