Nation+in+grip+of+a+liedership+crisis,+Andrew+Donaldson,+S+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 04 March 2007
=Nation in grip of a liedership crisis=


 * Andrew Donaldson**: //Eish!//

The popular drinking song ’De la Rey’ continues to generate excitement.

At every turn in our public life, there’s a bunch of chaps, pissed on beer, saying, “We are Afrikaners. This song is tit. Let’s sing it again. Your round, by the way. De la Rey, De la Rey ...”

Then they say, “We are the new Afrikaners. And we are on a quest for our Afrikaans identity. Which is something we lost somewhere back there, after 1994 or whatever. Mine’s a Castle. De la Rey, De la Rey ...”

When the fog of chappiness lifts — the morning after rugger, for example — some of the new Afrikaners get to think about the Afrikaans drinking song, and they plumb its eins-zwei-drei depths for hidden meaning and they say, “Holy whatever! This is not just a song about some old general, it’s a song about us! This is us! We are liederless. Ha-ha. Mimi Coertse-type pun. But seriously. To whom shall we turn in our weakened and directionless state?”

Like crazed monkeys at a dirtbin on the edge of a game reserve parking lot, the new Afrikaans chaps pick away at the song and, with a bit of spit and Elastoplast, something akin to doctrine rises. As the sociologist and musician Andries Bezuidenhout put it in a recent paper lamenting the loss of irony in current Afrikaans popular culture, “Two positions seem to have emerged [on De la Rey]: an optimistic reading and a pessimistic reading.”

Rapport editor Tim du Plessis is a proponent of the former. He blames the ANC government for creating conditions of uncertainty under which Afrikaners are seeking a new identity. “People are feeling more assertive than before,” was how he put it. “As if they want to say: we are fed-up with being singled out as the only scapegoat for all the evils of SA’s racist past. Was it only white Afrikaners who benefited from apartheid?”

Max du Preez, the well- known deep thinker, is a bit more pessimistic. He thinks the song is popular because its audience defines the “enemy” as a black government that is hostile to the Afrikaner.

“There’s not a word about black people in it,” he states. “And while the song is in no way racist, it manifests itself — when young people stand there — when they sing about how nasty the British were to the Boer women in the concentration camps, and how [when they sing] ‘General come and lead us, we will fall around you’, they’re not thinking about the British, they’re thinking about black, the enemy is now black.” (Thanks for that insight, Max.)

So, then, some thoughts on the De la Rey thing:

Why can’t Afrikaans chaps get excited about a real drinking song, like If Today Was A Fish, I’d Throw It Back In, You Can’t Have Your Kate And Edith Too and Are You Drinking With Me, Jesus? (which contains the deep query, one that addresses the very nature of the existential jambob: “Does your head pound, Jesus, as hungover you do rise/How does paradise look, Jesus, through holy bloodshot eyes?”)

These are good songs — so good, in fact, that you don’t even need to drink beer to appreciate them. But it helps.

Also, is it only Afrikaners who can have an identity crisis? What about the white English-speaking chaps? We’re losers too, you know, and more than just a little PO’ed as well. Maybe we also need a song, a stirring ballad that cuts to the very heart of our quiet desperation.

STILL with music: I’ve been getting mail berating me for describing Steve Hofmeyr as the “Boer Bono”. Don’t I know the difference between them, some of you ask.

Well, yes. One’s an opinionated jerk with a silly haircut. And the other is Steve Hofmeyr.


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/article.aspx?ID=402099**

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