Taking up almost half a page in last Friday’s Cape Times were six single music staves laying out the words and melody of the first half of the official South African national anthem.
There is no headline or caption to this “score”, but at the end a rather snide little pay-off is printed: “Now you know”, which added the tone of a prissy governess to the exercise. Adorned with this injunction, publishing the words and tune of this part of anthem — bad registration and mucky printing aside — was an example of the more jerk-wristed of political correctness and, published as it was, a day before the second rugby Test and two before Youth Day, painfully conspicuous in its intentions. Thanks to the Cape Times’s worthy mixture of patriotism and educative impulse, no longer will anyone be able to plead ignorance of the African words of this anthem. No one who buys the Cape Times, anyway.
Such impulses are truly admirable and would be even more so if, before printing, the Cape Times nannies had taken the trouble to get in a passing 10-year-old piano student to sub-edit the rather quaint version of musical notation that appeared above that hearty admonition of “Now you know”.
Perhaps I’m being too pedantic. Who really cares if a couple of empty bars precede the beginning of the tune? All these lacked was the instruction: “Fill in your own introduction here,” or perhaps it was that the needs of typography superseded those of musical grammar. In this version Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica pans out to a sort of 25-bar affair ending with the clumsy segue to the Die Stem and yet another empty bar.
Staying on the subject of musical illiteracy, it is also odd to see that the time signature — 4/4 — of the piece is randomly inserted here and there in the Cape Times’s version. In accepted musical notation, the time signature appears at the beginning of a piece; that’s all that’s necessary. A time signature is only reintroduced if there is a change to it. In the Cape Times “score” a precautionary measure has been taken in that the 4/4 signature is tossed in just in case someone has forgotten.
Why did the Cape Times elect not to publish at least some indication of the harmonic structure of the anthem? This could have been managed the simplistic way, by elementary chord indications or, better still, by a businesslike scored accompaniment to show harmonic progressions, appropriate chordal inversions and so on.
Was it that the Cape Times nannies believe that giving just the melody of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica is sufficient as its readers are either too dumb to understand much more and, anyway, will only need to sing along at rugby matches or other occasions where there are either bands or choirs to handle the advanced harmonic stuff?
To call this uncouth presentation of a half of our national anthem impolite would be to understate. It is the equivalent of publishing the words of the anthem grossly misspelt, mispunctuated, without any attention to grammar or upper and lower case. In other words, it is in the way of an insult. That it was published under the wagging finger of the newspaper makes it ludicrous on top of it all.
And why only Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica? For the meantime, anyway, we have a combined national anthem. The agreed version was stipulated by presidential proclamation in April 1994: the Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika words in Xhosa and/or Zulu and Sesotho and Die Stem in Afrikaans and English. Has the Cape Times decided to override this accommodation? And anyway, nowadays there is a whole generation of those who haven’t the faintest idea of the words or tune of Die Stem — nor for that matter, its correct harmony.
The Cape Times edition of half the national anthem is published with a little icon of scissors and a dotted line. Obviously it believes its half-arsed effort should be cut out and stuck on the fridge door for frequent reference and learning. A pity if anyone did this as the thing would be preserved as a reminder of the truly pathetic.
All hail to the earnest editorial nannies at Newspaper House for their well-meaning effort. But next time they decide to publish the words and tune of even a dismembered part of our national anthem, then they might do so, if not correctly, at least politely. Good publishing manners would have included the name of Enoch Sontonga, the composer of this part of the anthem. The Cape Times didn’t bother with such niceties. And if the nannies don’t know a crotchet from a crescendo, they might try phoning up the nearest music teacher and having things checked. It’s called sub-editing.
To end, a compliment to the Cape Times for, with this effort, it scores many Brownie points in that what it published serves as a superb example of how the often absurd exhibitions of runaway political correctness stumble over their own earnestness.