Do anthems wear out their appeal and need replacing to suit new conditions? James Ambrose Brown examines South Africa’s three anthems that tell the tale of the century
For the English it was God Save the Queen, and Land of Hope and Glory. For the Afrikaners it was Die Stem van Suid Afrika. For the African it was Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
Today, who ever hears the words of Land of Hope and Glory – except perhaps in a period movie? Yet its words trembled in the mouths and hearts of English- speaking South Africans who looked to Mother England for their cultural inspiration. “Land of hope and glory, mother of the free,/How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee./Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,/God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet!” This was the stuff of empire.
People stood at the end of every entertainment for the national anthem, God Save the King. This marked us out as subjects of the empire on which the sun never set. It was a moment of reverence and identification with a glorious history. His majesty’s smoke- wreathed visage gazed solemnly and majestically down as we shuffled out into Africa’s star-bright nights.
Politically, two bogeymen – DF Malan and Jan Smuts – dominated the pre-World War II scene. Smuts was loathed by the goldminers for crushing a Bolshevik uprising on the Rand. Malan, from his preekstoel (pulpit), fed the rising restlessness of the Afrikaners against the rooinek domination. These patriarchal folk were celebrating the century of their history from the Great Trek into the hinterland in 1836.
In this new trek, bearded men cracked the 6m voorslae (whips) over the wagon oxen. Women in pioneer dress looked askance at this city of foreigners. They were on their way to a koppie in Pretoria to lay the foundation stone of an everlasting memorial to their struggle to emerge as a people in a hostile land … they were the new Israel to be freed from the new Egypt of England.
They saw their chance when World War II called on the dominion children to rally to the motherland. This was the hour of the Grey Shirts, admirers of the Nazi Brown Shirts. Their guttural anti-Semitisms rang from the city hall steps and mounted Smuts police broke heads. Smuts seized the hour and power when he dragged the country belatedly into the war.
Slim Jannie’s shrinking form now supported the uniform of a British field marshal. Darling statesman of empire for the duration of the war and world senior statesman, sic transit gloria was the theme note of his last triumphal cavalcade through Johannesburg. The enfeebled strains of Land of Hope and Glory were kept alive, briefly, by the Dominion Party. Not even the royal visit – king, queen and princesses – could stem the rising tide of republicanism … nor the girlish vow of the future queen to dedicate her life to “the great imperial family”.
Not all the eulogies in the English- language press following the royal train’s progress through the land could stem the breaking of the wave. At wayside halts, curious old-time Boers in feathered hats gravely saluted the presence of die Engelse koning (the English king). The Rand Daily Mail grovelled. Die Transvaler managed with superb indifference to print a paragraph in an inside page. Then the inconceivable! From outside its offices in Johannesburg, Die Transvaler flashed the sign of victory. Hushed English voices recorded “The Nats are in”.
It was 1948 and the country would never be the same again. It was the vote of the Afrikaner ex-soldier and the anti- Smuts paramilitary Ossewa-brandwag that snatched the power. It seemed that “the holy fanaticism” of the volk had been blessed by the Almighty. Never was such fervency of thanksgiving. Never was such apprehension.
Within three scant years, children’s voices would no longer chant “Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us …” The new voice of South Africa was orchestrated by the groan of the ox-wagon, calling on all to live for this land of far-flung plains and crags.
Yes, Die Stem was an emotive hymn for the riders of the wagons, but it had the sound of a dirge in the lives of the black millions. These were now to live under the perpetual domination ensured by inferior education and total (if possible) separation. Not that the blacks had had it so good up till now. But now they were officially elected as the Bible’s hewers of wood and carriers of water.
The rulers who had learned their race controls under the Nazis put into effect their church-sanctified version. Apartheid. To an outside world that had so recently vowed that never again would men be discriminated against on grounds of race, the word had echoes of the German untermensch.
In vain was the protest of English ex- soldiers who marched in their tens of thousands through city streets in torch-lit rallies. And the word revolt was in the air, but their leaders, war- exhausted men, were not the stuff of revolutions. What the Afrikaans press dubbed blik fakkels (tin torches) were soon extinguished. Next up came the referendum on the republic. The Boer juggernaut took the road under the vierkleur.
One by one the civil liberties of the unelected majority went under. The thrusting symbol of Afrikaner dominance rose with phallic starkness at Paarl … never had a human tongue so newly created been so eulogised. A new people had created a language in Africa and would shape a new concept of nation in Africa. A nation that would be a jigsaw puzzle of fragments where every non- Ayran knew his place under a darkened sun.
English children learned to chant Die Stem but grew up to hold on to the financial empires their fathers built. Hoggenheimer was their god. The name- tag said it all in Boonzaaier’s anti- Semitic cartoons in Die Burgher. In the homelands, splendid houses of assembly rose among the mud huts and were presided over by kapteins in the sash and top hat of the old Boer republics.
The architect of all this survived being shot by a demented Englishman at that most English of all places – the Easter agricultural show of prize cattle and the latest in ploughs. Was it pure Greek theatre that HFVerwoerd survived only to fall to the dagger of a demented half-Greek? Struck down in the very seat of power and Draconian law-making. Quem dei perdere vuli (whom the gods would destroy). A madhouse run by its inmates and flourishing in spite of the outside world’s hostility. Yes, we talked then of the “outside world”. It was a time of mating with dubious South American dictators and naval visitations by warships of banana republics.
The pomp and ceremony of Parliament’s openings with airforce fly-overs and troop-lined streets heard the triumphal crash of cymbals and the braying of what had once seemed a simple pastoral hymn. Die Stem had come of age. True, the ox-wagon symbolism was still there, but now the purr of the Mercedes was heard in the land. It looked set for 1 000 years.
While two European language hymns of state still had emotional power over the English and the Afrikaner, there was actually another voice in the land. No one who heard the plaintive strains of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika could be unaware that its origins were in subjection. It is not a hymn of dominion or of belief in exclusive possession of the land. It has the kind of sound the Children of Israel raised in the brickfields of Egypt.
It had a tone of suffering resignation and hope long before the exiled Chief Albert Luthuli raised the cry: “Let my people go!” It was sung at the funerals of martyrs by huge throngs of otherwise voiceless masses. It was sung by the now forgotten radicals who linked arms and wept with them … those unpatriotic whites who had to be silenced. It was the hymn sung by Alan Paton’s umfundisi (counsellor) who wept and prophesied how he feared that when the whites had come to loving, his people would have come to hating.
Never was a hymn less revolutionary and never was a hymn more powerful. It did not stir the blood like the battle hymn of the American republic or France’s Marseillaise. It moved the soul of the people like a slowly rising wave. A wave that would carry all before it when its time came. Woven inextricably through it is the hope and trust in God for sure deliverance. When its time came, it was as if it had so seeped into the very conscience of the white nations that they relinquished power without a struggle.
Some would say that God had heard his people’s cry and softened the hearts of the white pharoahs. The cynic would say it was mere self-interest. Whatever! The time of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika is here.
How astonishing that the rising chorus of this anthem was unheard. We did not hear it when the pass law protesters were shot down at Sharpeville as they burned the hated symbol. We did not hear it when Nelson Mandela gave his rallying call to the people from the dock at the Treason Trial – and was silenced for a quarter of a century. We did not hear it when the inquest on Steve Biko declared his killers innocent. We did not hear it when the white nation was mobilised to fight a losing war against a black army that barely existed in military terms. We did not hear it above the rallying cry of “total onslaught”. We blocked our ears.
So where are we today? We know where the spirit of Land of Hope and Glory and Die Stem took us – from imperialism to dictatorship. We do not know where the spirit of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika is taking us in the next century. The anthem pleads with God to bless this Africa, guide her children, guide her leaders and give her peace.
Or will it too give way to another anthem expressing a new spirit that embraces all?