It would be difficult not to get embroiled in the raging debate about the merits or otherwise of Bok van Blerk’s hit single De la Rey. People across the still-unresolved racial divide that is South Africa are up in arms: either about the fact that it should be banned outright for fostering a climate of racial intolerance, backward-lookingness, or as a call for a new Boer War; or about the fact that Afrikaners have the same right as anyone else to let their lungs rip in the name of self-expression.
I read somewhere that, when Johannesburg International (formerly Jan Smuts) Airport was renamed for struggle hero OR Tambo, someone went up there with a spray can and tried to change the twice-renamed aerodrome to De La Rey International.
Formerly sane-seeming commentators came out with muffled guns blazing, saying that Afrikaners had a right to express their sense of loss of empowerment in the new dispensation. Black non-Afrikaners howled back, telling the new generation of neo-Boers that they should be lucky just to be alive, and not have to negotiate the perils of the Australian Outback or the Canadian Tundra. No one was very articulate on either side. It was like the bad old days — slanging matches that got no one anywhere, and left all sense of perspective hanging punch drunk on the ropes.
I even heard rumours that this De la Rey pop song was a big hit in the dance halls and speakeasies of black townships up and down the country. But, given what little I have been able to read or hear about its lyrics, I think this was an early exercise in disinformation. Why would black youth want to join arms in a Mexican wave and raise a shout in the name of a long-dead Afrikaner resistance general getting back on his horse to come and give leadership to the Boers once again?
But don’t discount any possibility. Black youngsters might be joining in a national cry for leadership, any kind of leadership, in the face of a rapidly widening crisis of credible direction in the land we live in. Or maybe (if this story is true, which seems unlikely) they just liked the tune.
In a strange reflection of the career of the hapless General de la Rey himself, the whole story seems to be living a kind of underground existence, while being a very public issue indeed. Few young Afrikaners I accosted in the streets over the past couple of months would admit to knowing much about the song. Even fewer would admit to being among those who filled rugby stadiums with the roar of its patriotic, underground chorus.
Fewer still would confess that it gave them a sense of belonging in the dodgy, treasonable thinking of the Boeremag, some of whose leading members are currently on trial in the Supreme Court in Pretoria after letting off a series of explosions in Soweto and supposedly amassing arms caches as a prelude to a final onslaught against majority rule.
The core issue would seem to be that there are substantial numbers of Afrikaners who share this sense of disempowerment. However subliminal these thoughts may be, there is no avoiding the fact that Van Blerk was thinking about them when he came up with the chorus for his rousing anthem. He argues that De la Rey was simply a catchy rhyme that popped into his head. Unfortunately, what the general’s surname rhymed with was the thought that someone should ‘die Boere kom lei”– someone should come and lead the Boers once again.
Where all the cries of misunderstanding and innocent intent fall apart is precisely in this disclaimer. If the song was merely a cry for leadership from any quarter, why limit its demands to leadership of the Boers, rather than the greater demands of leadership for the whole country — or, indeed, for a world that is generally in turmoil and crisis? While an illegal war led by world powers is raging in Iraq, and less high-profile, Boer-led, counter-independence mercenary activities are exposed in Equatorial Guinea and territories closer to home, can this truly be defined as a philosophical plea for nothing more than emotional guidance? In a word, can the unexpectedly delighted Bok, as he laughs all the way to the bank, really expect us to believe that he has not deliberately lit a firecracker under an already primed tinder-box of reactionary thinking?
Looking around, I cannot see what the Boere have to fear. There are common terrors that have become increasingly exposed with the advent of a more enlightened approach to governance (however limited its success). This is part of being awake and conscious in the modern world.
Far more than that, it looks like the Boers that Bok and his peers weep for are more secure on the African continent and, indeed, in the world at large, than they have ever been. Empowered Afrikaans banking and beer-brewing institutions now dominate the stock exchanges of places as far apart as London and Shanghai. H Rider Haggard’s fabled empires of gold and undreamt-of wealth are now the legitimised stalking grounds of white South African commerce and industry. And precious little has really changed on the ground, in terms of the rigid economic structures of apartheid, right here back at home.
So I think Bok should go and suck on it. I think the minister of arts and culture is right to say that we cannot ban it. But I think there should also be someone out there who asks a few questions about all those punters who are so ferociously buying into this dumb psychology (a bigger seller, they say, than Brenda or Mandoza) and what their increasingly arrogant buying power means to where the country is really going.