“The museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everywhere now, like a dimension of life.” Jean Baudrillard – The Precession of Simulacra67
Pleasure at contemporary boeremusiek events is framed by discourses of duty in similar fashion. Boeremusiek today is considered to be in clear alignment with South Africa’s history of white oppression, which has led to the stigmatization of the genre. Yet, it has been repressed by the Afrikaner establishment as an undesirable form of Afrikaner popular culture from its earliest history. The history of boeremusiek is testament to the limiting effects
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Speaking within the context of a decades-long exile in London, the composer Stanley Glasser “remembers” precisely this caricature of boeremusiek as marker of South African innocence: “Go to a Vastrap and see what you can do with it. Go to a Vastrap evening in Nelspruit or wherever. And see what it means, the dancing, the life, it’s all part of the music … I’m talking about if there’s a dance in Nelspruit on a Saturday night and all the farmers are coming in and the locals are coming in and there is a Boereorkes. Where do you guys ... do you ever roll up to that sort of thing? No. I used to love it in Bethel, going to a dance in the local hall, with a Boereorkes playing. It was so lively and everybody was in a good mood and you’d see African children looking through the window and everybody was enjoying it in their own way.” Stanley Glasser. Interview by Stephanus Muller, January 18, 2001.
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41 that dominant notions of whiteness have had on the scope of white aesthetic expression. Much of the self-reflexive discourses of the genre hinge on trying to carve out a space for the sensuous pleasures afforded by this type of music within the set boundaries of Afrikaner nationalist ideology.
The BMG’s code of conduct illustrates this objective. It stipulates that “in accordance with the moral standards of our Afrikaner volk” every event shall be opened with prayer, that members shall refrain from any conduct that can bring the organisation into disrepute, and that “drunkenness, debauchery, foul language” and “any deed harmful to the reputation of the Boeremusiekgilde” will not be tolerated. Members who fail to adhere to these measures face termination of their membership.68 In reality these measures are less stringent than they might seem. To my knowledge no-one has ever been expelled from the BMG for contravening the code, which seems to function as a rhetorical subservience to Afrikaner nationalist politics.
Opening events with a reading from the Bible and prayer is another contemporary example of framing pleasure with discourses of duty. The passages chosen are inevitably either Psalm 150, a call to praise the Lord with music and dancing, or “A time for Everything” from Ecclesiastes 3: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: ... a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance...”69 This extraction of pleasure from theological discourses often goes hand in hand with subconscious feelings of guilt, as is evident in jokes involving dominees (ministers), dancing and sex and unsolicited justifications for dancing made from the stage. Nevertheless, it provides a theological justification for the less stern Afrikaner social world that boeremusiek is thought to embody.
This strategy might have been successful, were it not for the stark contrast between the event space and the harsh realities of life in contemporary South Africa. The BMG explicitly and continuously affirms its apolitical character as a strategy of uniting competing factions amongst its members and, after 1994, as a survival strategy within a political context inimical to white minorities. Yet, the very negation of the contemporary political reality sets up these spaces as otherworldly – especially considering the fact that Afrikaners habitually engage in political talk, almost as a leisure activity, and that Afrikaans media are awash with political discourse. Enjoying oneself in the sole company of other whites is one of the privileges afforded by the entrance ticket. Black presence is always
68
Boeremusiekgilde, Boeremusiekgilde: 15 goue jare 1989-2004, 122.
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at the periphery, as in the Esterhuyze cartoon: selling goods, cleaning up.70 The freedom for children to run around without an anxious parent on the lookout for danger is turned into a commodity. One can buy the hospitality of a freshly baked pancake, kerrie en rys, vetkoek, spookasem and pretend that the gathering has come about spontaneously. The event, however, is about more than mere political escapism. The fact that politics are kept outside of these events creates a simulation of a lost set of social relations, a performance of colonial nostalgia. It suggests a time before South African democracy, and even before apartheid, when whiteness in South Africa seemed “natural” and without anxiety; when patterns of oppression were so ingrained in the fabric of a society that it went unnoticed, deserved no comment, and entertained the fiction of innocence. This is the dilemma of postcolonial whiteness in South Africa: that it has become impossible to locate retrospectively such spaces of innocence.
The obvious dislocation of real life and performance space, a result of the knowledge that the reality of the event is in very distinct ways a prepared one, triggers a desire for authenticity, a desire to come close again to the nostalgic reconstructions of the past. “The desire for authenticity”, as Janelle Wilson has noted, “stems from a process of fragmentation and a feeling of distance or loss. We seek the authentic because we want to regain something lost; we wish to make our own existence more credible”.71 Ironically, the nostalgic discursive move of casting boeremusiek as forever vanishing, a move that creates the conditions for the perception of the contemporary boeremusiek as unreal in the first place, becomes a necessary stratagem for maintaining the credibility of the contemporary. In the face of a loss of authenticity a process is set in motion that Baudrillard calls the “the panic- stricken production of the real”. A second strategy of salvage, rather ironically, therefore involves a reinjection of the pleasures of the folk into discourses of duty. In his history of the first five years of the Boeremusiekgilde, I.L. Ferreira, for example, states that when it comes to the advancement of boeremusiek, it is not merely a matter of longing for sensuous pleasure, but about advancing the volkseie (perhaps best translated as “national character of the volk”).72 The organisation’s concern with youth development should be understood in this context. Preserving
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I do not mean to suggest any sinister motivations behind this phenomenon – merely that, as a predominantly white folk music, these events by implication celebrate whiteness. That I should feel the need to explain myself on this point is again an indication of the difficulty in being “innocently” white in a still racially stratified South Africa today.
71
Janelle L. Wilson, Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning (Massachusetts: Rosemont, 2005), 58.
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43 the folk nature of boeremusiek practices by actively participating in pleasure, becomes a moral imperative in a cultural nationalist project.
An example of this process can be found in a rhetorical question I have often heard from the stage at boeremusiek events: “Who said boeremusiek can’t be fun?!”, when, at least as far as the participants are concerned, no-one had suggested it in the first place. This question achieves several things at once. Firstly, it subjunctivises the reality of the participants who had, in fact, been having fun. Secondly, it is an example of how pleasure is reinjected into a revised discourse of duty. Far from a casual enquiry, it creates crisis: you are obliged to have fun for the greater cause of preserving boeremusiek. Finally, having created the conditions for experiencing a loss of authenticity, the future of the genre is depicted as balancing precariously on the existence of the organisation; it starts depending on this discourse of crisis for its continued existence. Pronouncing the death of fun therefore serves, simultaneously, in creating a simulated reality and in portraying the ideals of the organisation as the primary means of overcoming the resulting lack of authenticity. What initially served as representations of pleasure is overturned by discourses of duty into commemorations of pleasure.
Conclusions
Since the earliest public considerations of the genre, boeremusiek has been forever vanishing. Suppressed by the Afrikaner establishment as an undesirable form of white popular culture, boeremusiek and public institutions have attempted to recover the stigma associated with the genre by trying to align it with Afrikaner nationalist discourses. Nonetheless the ambivalence of the genre remained, celebrating the materiality of the body despite Calvinist preferences for ideality and racial hybridity despite a political ideology of separate development. Rather than challenging the status quo openly, boeremusiek has been practised in the virtual zone of subjunctivity. By constructing the pleasures of boeremusiek as a simulatory performance of an extinct social or musical practice, it became possible to enjoy the music within a system opposed to it. Contemporary boeremusiek events are embedded with discourses relating to these historical antecedents. Yet the subjunctivising of contemporary boeremusiek can also be understood from the perspective of the present. In an unfortunate turn of events, the genre, despite its
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complex relationship with Afrikaner nationalism, is today considered to be in clear alignment with South Africa’s history of white oppression. If a certain measure of white redemption were possible in a musical sphere negligent of an unjust ideology, this is no longer the case. It has become impossible in the current political climate to play innocently at the historical social and political reality of the boeredans.
The contemporary boeremusiek event mourns the end of Afrikaner innocence. It is a simulation of a utopian historical, social and political reality and, by the same token, a monument to what has been lost: musically, politically, socially, and above all, personally. It mourns the loss of spaces of white innocence in the intimate settings of the household, the loving nature of intergenerational relationships, a mother putting her child to bed with the reassuring sounds of boeremusiek, the uninhibited movement of the body in dance. The concertina carries with it all the pain of a personal cultural heritage fundamentally tainted by political transgression. It points to the initial success and inevitable demise of whiteness in Africa. It speaks of vulnerability, of frustration at unrealised potential, of work that has been in vain. It carries the burden of history, the attempts of people trying to live authentically despite this burden, the becoming unwanted on a continent one has called one’s home. The concertina echoes the melancholy of the loss of power, of a way of life, of innocence, of freedom – a nostalgia that cannot hide one’s own cultural complicity in this sorry state of affairs. Boeremusiek cannot exist in contemporary South Africa: it can only exist in the subjunctive.
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