Imagine being brought up in a medium-sized suburban home with a well-kept lawn, a lock-up garage and a dog.
Imagine going to a school where similar-looking kids with similar lunch boxes and haircuts surround you.
Imagine having a woman called Sarah or Paulina who washes your clothes and has cooked your food since you were born, day after day, and leaves for her unknown family in an unknown place at weekends.
Life is bliss and the family’s biggest worry for the year is where the December holidays should be spent.
Then imagine waking up one day to a black president whose successor calls your tribe “colonialists of a special kind”, to mixed schools, affirmative-action policies and the international community declaring the policies that kept your world intact a “crime against humanity”.
Imagine realising at once that you were lied to during your formative years — by your parents, your school, the media and the church.
Welcome to the world of Fokofpolisiekar, the Afrikaans hard-rock band from Bellville, Cape Town, that have been shaking the foundations of the Afrikaner establishment since they burst on to the local music scene in 2003.
With a name like that you can only cause kak — and that was exactly what they set out to do.
“We were kind of in between this whole thing. We were too young to really understand what apartheid was about, but too old to be part of the people who know nothing about it,” says guitarist and lyricist Hunter Kennedy at the beginning of the documentary, Fokofpolisiekar — Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do, directed by Bryan Little.
It’s a fast and eclectic look at the band that changed the local music landscape provides interesting insights into how the outfit came to be and what underlies the group’s angry, nihilistic take on life.
Although the editing could have been done more neatly (I like to know who’s talking, what year we are in and where the gigs were played), the doccie brings you closer to the five musketeers who set the stage alight with their foul mouths, guitar riffs and explosive lyrics. It also clarifies the band’s abrupt break-up in 2008 after too many broken arms, hate mail and front-page furores.
The movie’s title is an interesting choice. At first glance it is obvious that it refers to the band: twentysomething, drunk and angry.
But after watching the documentary the title perhaps more aptly speaks to the Afrikaner laager the band had to vacate to “liberate ourselves from all that kak”, in the words of bass player Wynand Myburgh.
A matter (sadly) not touched on in the doccie is the relationship between the band members and their families and communities. It was widely reported in the Afrikaans press during Fokofpolisiekar’s heyday that their folk weren’t happy with all the kak they were causing. Some openly condemned the deeds of their sons.
According to bassist Myburgh, the band’s leitmotif was always to liberate itself from the chains of the volk: FW de Klerk, Casspirs, the AWB, portapools, He-man, the Dutch Reformed Church —
“Fuck everyone, fuck everything, I’m gonna liberate myself in all possible ways. I’m not scared, I feel a fuck. We had to liberate ourselves from all that kak,” says an anxious-looking Myburgh, smoking his way through his interview.
(As in the case of Fokofpolisiekar, cigarettes have always played a significant symbolic role in the Afrikaner psyche. Smoking, particularly at school, meant you were bad, dumb and rude. You would in all probability end up in jail or in hell. No wonder the first line of their first mega-hit was: “All the fucked-up children smoke —”)
Lead singer Francois van Coke is, ironically, also the shyest of the gang. “We just thought fuck it all. We’re gonna push it as hard as we can and make this thing happen.”
Kennedy is the philosopher of the five. “Alles was kak [everything was shit]. We were in a very juvenile state of mind. We were not in touch with what was going on.”
So they decided to start a band, give it a name that would piss off Jackie Selebi and sing about all the chains that suffocate ideas — especially religion — without giving a big fat F. The centre didn’t hold.
After Myburgh wrote “Fuck god” on a fan’s wallet at a Witbank after-party, the band’s critical stance on religion exploded in the Afrikaans press and led to an outcry from the religious establishment for a boycott of Fokofpolisiekar’s music.
The letters pages were full and theologians debated for weeks about the significance (or not) of writing those two words on a washed-out wallet.
This pointed more to an ignorance from their critics, who somehow missed the rather blunt lyrics — such as “Can someone perhaps call god and tell him we don’t need him anymore” — Van Coke had been shouting off stages since 2003.
But the total onslaught took its toll and the band called it quits in 2008 to pursue individual careers, albeit in the music industry (out of Fokofpolisiekar flowed aKING, Van Coke Kartel and Die Heuwels Fantasties).
And although it’s always a risk to eulogise too early, one could say with comfort that Fokofpolisiekar broke open new frontiers with their no-holds-barred attitude that encouraged disrespect for all forms of authority.
Like Glenda Kemp, Johannes Kerkorrel and Breyten Breytenbach, they were pioneers of a new era and have the scars to prove it.
Fokofpolisiekar: “Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do” premieres at the Encounters documentary film festival at the Nu Metro, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, from July 2 to 19. For info go to www.encounters.co.za