A Catalogue of Seepage: Apartheid’s Political Grammar, Afrikaans Music Historiography and Early Afrikaner Nationalism

Abstract

This article seeks to excavate a ‘political grammar’ of apartheid from two seemingly unrelated discourses, namely Afrikaans music historiography and apartheid thinking. At the most superficial level, these discourses share a common ideal in that each sought – explicitly
or implicitly – to further the Afrikaner nationalist cause. Precisely what the so-called nationalist project in its twentieth-century manifestations entailed is not self-evident. Thus, Hermann Giliomee (2003a; 2003b) has argued that two discrete streams of Afrikaner nationalism – a hard-line racial type concentrated in the north of the country and a moderate cultural type concentrated in the south – operated during the decades prior to 1948, and that apartheid thinking was disproportionately influenced by the latter. This geography of Afrikaner nationalism, this article will suggest, mistakenly disassociates racebiological from cultural justifications of Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid, thereby recuperating a seemingly more palatable culturalist Afrikaner nationalism freed of the ideological freight of eugenics and scientific racism. In order to demonstrate the bind between biological racism and cultural nationalism, I will show how tropes associated with the former, namely purity, contamination, deviance, and social and moral degeneration, pervaded Afrikaans music historiography, specifically writings concerned with vernacular and sacred music. What emerges from a consideration of the writings of apartheid ideologues and commentators on Afrikaans music, are the ways in which certain conventions, categories and prohibitions associated with apartheid thinking resurfaced in Afrikaans music historiography as principles governing aesthetic ideals and modes of valorisation; a diffuse set of evaluative axioms that meshed biological racism with culture so that physical difference encrypted cultural meaning.
If one is to grasp apartheid’s political grammar – the horizon of meaning, conventions and practices and the modes of subjectivisation instituted by it – it is necessary to engage with questions of naming and identity formation, for these acts brought into being new modes of identification. (Norval 1996, 7) Music can make the issues of nationalism more real and at the same time complicate them by shrouding them in myth. ... Ultimately, it may well be the true measure of music’s significance for nationalism that it provides so many and such fluid contexts for the nation itself. (Bohlman 2004, xviii, xxv)