Exploring the Aesthetics of Reconciliation: Rugby and the South African National Anthem

Abstract

Turning to the great white South African ritual, rugby, this article probes the role of South Africa's national anthems in the elaborately staged and self-congratulatory global spectacle of the Rugby World Cup 1995 and the politics of nation building of which it became part. Following Roland Barthes' reading of Eisenstein film stills, the article ponders the meaning of the obtuse in the opening ceremony of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which remains one of the most poignant and powerful moments in post-1994 South Africa. It dwells on the meaning of difference, which, in Rian Malan's tortured phrase, exists in South Africa as 'parallel kingdoms of consciousness'. Reading the singing of the South African national anthems during the opening ceremony of the 1995 Rugby World Cup allows the possibility of contrasting difference as an independent and regulative agent to moral difference, which paradoxically depends on an improbable degree of 'sameness' in all other categories, including the historical. Even if South Africans are not (yet) a nation, it is possible to explore what can at the very least be called an intuitive sense of interdependence.


(SA J Musicology: 2001 21: 19-38)