The 1955 argument for retreating into the boeremusiek museum, quoted earlier, has remained remarkably consistent in contemporary boeremusiek reception. I have argued here that, since at least the 1930s, boeremusiek posed an embarrassment to certain groups of white Afrikaners for reasons of morality, religion, racial politics and class. Such an important part of popular culture, although it could be ignored in official discourse, could not be completely suppressed. Gradually, boeremusiek was sanitised into a listening culture, freed from the embarrassing materiality of the body, and reinvented as “traditional” – a category that, as I have shown, harbours a deep suspicion for liveness.
It is in this context that the activities of the Traditional Boer Music Club of South Africa (TBK), founded in 1981, need to be understood. With only 605 members, the club exists at the margins of contemporary Afrikaner culture.42 Yet, it inhabits a significant discursive space in the boeremusiek scene, primarily due to its ongoing feud with the Boeremusiekgilde (BMG) over matters of musical authenticity. The aims of the club are described as “the collection and fostering of traditional boeremusiek” and “the inviolate preservation of the inalienable and unique character of traditional boeremusiek”.43 To this end the club has primarily engaged itself, since the earliest years of its existence, with the collection and re-issuing of historical recordings. Although the TBK organises dances and other live boeremusiek gatherings, the club is distinctly discourse oriented. Under its banner have appeared numerous newsletters, three volumes on boeremusiek legends, a history of the origins and development of boeremusiek and an emerging digital archive.
The club has provided various (and sometimes competing) definitions of “traditional boeremusiek” over the years, most of which acknowledge the difficulties inherent in such a project. Stephaan van Zyl, a member of the
42
Figure provided by Kobus Müller in February 2011.
43
“Die versameling en uitbou van tradisionele boeremusiek” en “om die onvervreembare en unieke karakter van tradisionele boeremusiek ongeskonde te bewaar.”“Tradisionele Boeremusiekklub van Suid-Afrika,” Meer oor die klub - Grondwet, n.d., http://www.boeremusiek.org/grondwet.html.
31 committee since 1985, defined traditional boeremusiek as “originally European folk music that entered the country with the settlers and, through the years, developed its own character here in South Africa. All the Dixieland, Jazz, Ragtime and other influences from America, which so dominate ‘Modern Boeremusiek’ can, therefore, never form part of traditional boeremusiek”.44 Van Zyl saw the choice of instruments as a crucial component of the definition of traditional boeremusiek:
Attempting to play traditional Boeremusiek on modern instruments is a sign of bad taste. I personally consider electric guitars, electronic organs, drums, etc. undesirable and even one wrong instrument can spoil the character of traditional Boeremusiek.
The official definition, provided on the TBK’s website, states that boeremusiek (“Boer music”) is
instrumental folk music, dating from the period during which the people who practiced it were internationally known as “Die Boere” (The Boers) of South Africa. It is informal music that is played in a distinctive way and was primarily intended as accompaniment for social dancing. For the purpose of this conversation we exclude other kinds of Afrikaans music from the same period like ballads, serenades and music aimed at passive audiences.45
Ed Retief, on the other hand, identified it as music that “speaks to the soul; it touches your heart and is easy on the ear. After your feet have stopped itching, there is always something that stays with you – a longing to listen to more of those lekker sounds”.46 Elsewhere boeremusiek is defined as a music that mirrors the soul of the Afrikaner volk or the music of “Europeans with mostly Afrikaans as home language”.47 Jimmy MacDonald draws an interesting correlation between traditional boeremusiek and antiques:
You know, I often hear the argument that one should develop yourself and try to progress in your music [en probeer om vooruit te gaan in jou musiek]. I also hear the accusation that we want to drive the oxwagon on the high street of the modern age. This is how I think about this issue: When you buy a Model T Ford and adapt it with a V8 engine, you totally take away its value as an antique. If you collect antique furniture and you spray-paint an old wash-stand a different colour, you have messed it up and it is no longer of any value. There are things, therefore, that are more
44
Stephaan Van Zyl and Ed Retief, “Wat is tradisionele boeremusiek?,” Spesiale nuusbrief van die Tradisionele Boeremusiekklub van Suid- Afrika, August 1989, 7.
45
“What is Boer music?”, n.d., http://www.boeremusiek.org.za/eng_mainframe.htm.
46
Van Zyl and Retief, “Wat is tradisionele boeremusiek?,” 7.
47
Ed Retief, “Verskillende elemente van TBM - ’n persoonlike ervaring,” Opskommel, August 1992, 17. “What is Boer music?”.
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valuable in their original format. Why, then, mess them up? Concerning the oxwagon: boeremusiek was composed in the time of the oxwagon. I don’t want to drive an oxwagon along the high street at peak hour, but grant me the privilege of enjoying boeremusiek at a suitable time as part of our culture.48
The lingering impact of the subjunctivising discourses of the past is particularly evident in MacDonald’s version of boeremusiek as museum piece. Although his primary concern is preserving the music in its “original format”, “enjoying boeremusiek at a suitable time” is a secondary function of the boeremusiek museum. Again the frivolity of boeremusiek demands careful segregation from serious matters. One enjoys boeremusiek by retreating from real life. These definitions establish boeremusiek as historical artefact, something that can be collected or discarded, displayed or forgotten, protected or contaminated. Boeremusiek, although you may hear it resounding in contemporary life, is of a bygone era. Contemporary traditional boeremusiek functions as an inner souvenir of the past – a monument of the heart.49
When traditional boeremusiek resounds in contemporary life, it is as a death mask. As the imagines of Roman burial rites hovered between commemorating and representing the deceased before taking pride of place in the atrium of the Roman home, so too, both newly composed and contemporary renditions of “traditional” numbers are firmly rooted in an aesthetic of simulation. Contemporary renditions are measured for their “correctness” against the canonical 1930s recordings, especially those by Faan Harris and Die Vier Transvalers. “Correctness” is understood in an all-encompassing way, including original instrumentation, key, melody and ornamentation. Frozen in their recorded state in terms of musical content, arrangements of these standards are frowned upon and often referred to as “stealing someone’s thunder”.50 These cryogenised boeremusiek standards are at the same time objects of mourning and monuments to traditional boeremusiek. As the memory of a deceased loved one is carried in the heart, signifying both the end of mourning and its beginning, an acceptance of loss and a constant reminder thereof, the boeremusiek standard performs the work of mourning.
48
Letter to the editor, Nuusbrief van die TBK, 1996 no. 4, 2.
49
Oom Willie Marais writes in a letter of thanks to the presenters of Span die Bokseil – a radio programme on boeremusiek: “You two are busy erecting monuments in people’s hearts that will never be destroyed” (Julle twee is besig om monumente in mense harte [sic] op te rig, wat nooit vernietig sal word nie.) Opskommel, March 1991, 19-20.
50
33 The work of mourning finds a substantive manifestation in the material commemoration of boeremusiek legends – an ongoing TBK project. In fact, the club was founded due to a fundraising effort to erect a tombstone at the neglected grave of concertina player Faan Harris. In my interview on 31 January 2011 with Lourens Aucamp, a founding member of the club, he suggested that the decision to erect the tombstone could partly be related to the popularity of the Vier Transvalers, the band with which Faan Harris played on a radio programme Toeka se Treffers (‘Hits of yore’, again an indication of the pre-eminence of historical recordings in TBK discourse). In 1985 followed a tombstone for Silver de Lange (Figure 3) and in 1986 an obelisk for the Lydenburg Vastrappers, the first band from rural South Africa to make recordings in Johannesburg. The most ambitious project, a boere-orkes in bronze in Pietersburg (now called Polokwane), was completed in 1994 with the support of the Pietersburg municipality. However, the TBK does not react positively when accused of conducting a museum culture. In a letter to the Afrikaans Sunday newspaper Rapport entitled “They only put stones on graves!”, a Mrs J. Lombard accused the TBK of “merely putting stones on ... people’s graves, instead of canvassing for boeremusiek”.51 Piet Bester, then chairman of the club, responded indignantly with an inventory of the club’s activities. Apart from venerating the pioneers of boeremusiek, the TBK also reissued historical recordings and sponsored boeremusiek competitions, talks and presentations at schools, and boeremusiek dances and events.52 He ended his letter with the accusation that if Mrs Lombard were a “true” boeremusiek supporter, she would long since have become a member of the club and familiarised herself with its projects.
A “true” boeremusiek supporter, as is evident from the extensive coverage of the differences between the TBK and the BMG in the newsletters of the TBK, is someone who accepts the particular demands traditional boeremusiek is said to make in terms of performance practice. These markers of authenticity have many corollaries in social norms. The organisation’s continued campaign against the verbastering of boeremusiek cannot but be read
51
Letter to the editor, “Hul sit dan net stene op grafte!”, Rapport, February 5, 1989.
52
Letter to the editor, “Weet u wat klub vir musiek doen?”, Rapport, February 19, 1989.
Figure 3: Bobby Pennells at the tombstone for Silver de Lange. Bobby won his first banjo from a lottery.
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in terms of the Afrikaner nationalist fear for racial hybridization: for the Afrikaner to remain racially pure, its folk music had to remain equally free of alien influences.53 Ironically, the same argument was made by a letter writer in 1955 in rejecting boeremusiek on the grounds that boeremusiek had origins in Cape Malay culture and was therefore unacceptable in terms of “musical apartheid”.54 This shows the extent of the invention that traditional boeremusiek had undergone in fifty years: from what was commonly referred to as hotnotsmusiek (hottentot’s music) to a representation of Afrikanerdom, although it has to be said that the idea of boeremusiek as Afrikaner symbol has always elicited wide dissent from certain segments of Afrikaner society.
Traditional boeremusiek suffers from its schizophrenic subservience to Afrikaner nationalism, on the one hand, and the memory of its hybrid beginnings, on the other. Being at the same time too white and not white enough, traditional boeremusiek provides a haven where Afrikaner innocence can be recovered, but always with a sense of revulsion. What is mourned by traditional boeremusiek is the disorientating loss of self that occurs in the space between a tradition sanitized into a suitable history, and the realization that true authenticity can only occur where such intervention is absent. A “true” folk music tradition for the Afrikaner can only be located at the point where Afrikaner identity is impossible.
Read as a hyperreal discourse, the TBK injects signs of authenticity everywhere – references to an acutely felt but objectively absent Afrikaner folk tradition. These monuments – representing, commemorating – mark their own dissolution. The Afrikaner is not the sole proprietor of anything – not of a language and not of a music. Every performance of traditional boeremusiek transgresses its own authenticity. Yet boeremusiek inspires and saddens, touches the soul, brings the body into movement. What is left to mourn are sacred, acutely emotional monuments of the heart. Traditional boeremusiek cannot exist in contemporary South Africa. The only possible mode of existence for traditional boeremusiek is as simulacrum.
53
As in all organisations the official statements of the club do not necessarily correspond with the opinions of all of its members, some of whom are much more nuanced on these issues. Even though some TBK members would insist that they like the music and are not interested in its political connotations, I have taken the opinions expressed in the club’s newsletter as its official pronouncements on certain issues.
54
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