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African Studies

ISSN: 0002-0184 (Print) 1469-2872 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cast20

Afrikaners is Plesierig! Voëlvry Music, Anti-apartheid Identities and Rockey Street Nightclubsin Yeoville (Johannesburg), 1980s–90s

Maria Suriano & Clara Lewis

To cite this article: Maria Suriano & Clara Lewis (2015) Afrikaners is Plesierig! Voëlvry Music,Anti-apartheid Identities and Rockey Street Nightclubs in Yeoville ( Johannesburg), 1980s–90s,African Studies, 74:3, 404-428, DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2015.1004850

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2015.1004850

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Afrikaners is Plesierig!1 Voelvry Music,Anti-apartheid Identities and RockeyStreet Nightclubs in Yeoville(Johannesburg), 1980s–90s

Maria Suriano∗ and Clara Lewis

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

(Received 4 October 2013; accepted 14 April 2014)

In the 1980s, Afrikaans-speaking young South Africans increasingly disassociated themselves from

the dominant institutions, i.e., the Calvinist church, the state and the parental generation. Their oppo-

sitional ideas could be partly conveyed through Voelvry, rock-punkish music at the time labelled

‘Boerepunk’ and ‘Alternative Afrikaans Music Movement’, which lasted for a short span of time,

between the 1980s and the early 1990s. Voelvry contributed to some extent to changing the wide-

spread images of Afrikaners as inherently conformist. Drawing on novel oral sources, newspapers

and secondary literature, this article argues that Yeoville (Johannesburg) – Rockey Street in particu-

lar – as a space of cross-cultural interaction facilitated the expression and popularisation of anti-

apartheid identities through music. Two popular nightclubs on Rockey Street were Rumours, a jazz

club started in 1979, and the Black Sun. Rumours became the central meeting place for the Anglo-

phone Yeoville residents and habitues, while the Afrikaans-speaking Voelvry fans rotated around

the latter. The different spaces chosen, along with the diverse types of music produced and consumed,

hint at the existence of lines of division and issues of contention among the English- and Afrikaans-

speaking counterculture white South Africans.

Key words: Voelvry; counterculture Afrikaners; Yeoville; Johannesburg; anti-apartheid struggle;

popular music and politics

Ja die lewe is maar swaar

Vit ’n alternatiewe Afrikaner

Die stad is nie my eie nie

Dis ’n nuwe tipe anger

[Yes life is tough

For an alternative Afrikaner

The city is not my own

There’s a new type of anger.2]

The mid- to late 1970s saw the beginning of the establishment of Johannesburg’s

counterculture and rich music scene being centred in Yeoville, which was one of

the first urban spaces in apartheid South Africa where the Group Areas Act of

1950 began to break down. Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s this neigh-

bourhood hosted numerous performances by musicians who played Voelvry, a

∗Corresponding author. Email: Maria.Suriano@wits.ac.za

ISSN 0002-0184 print/ISSN 1469-2872 online/15/03000404–25# 2015 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrandhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2015.1004850

African Studies 74(3) December 2015

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satirical and angry rock genre with some minor punk influences sung in Afrikaans.

Voelvry consists of two Afrikaans words – Voel (bird) and Vry (free). Literally

‘bird free’, the term may be translated as ‘free as a bird’, ‘free love’, ‘free

penis’, or ‘outlaw’. Voelvry, which to some extent was also a social movement,

emerged in the 1980s, years in which there was a general awakening of protest

music in South Africa. The Voelvryers, i.e. members of Voelvry, were relatively

young Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who were deeply dissatisfied with the

National Party (NP) and with the stifling expectations of their parents. Artists

were white Afrikaans-speaking men who played subversive and irreverent anti-

apartheid rock ’n roll and slightly punk-inspired music dubbed ‘Boerepunk’

(Allan 1989; de Waal 1989). They were mostly from middle-class backgrounds

(see Grundlingh 2004:487). Song lyrics and even artistic names wittingly attacked

and mocked the key symbols of the Afrikaner identity.

Yeoville was one of the few spaces in apartheid South Africa where there was

no strict racial segregation.3 Through the lens of Voelvry music, this article sets

out to reconstruct how Yeoville, in particular its venues located on Rockey

Street, enabled the consciously ‘outlawed’ Afrikaners to express oppositional

identities in sharp contrast to the hegemonic Afrikaner identity that had been con-

structed and was closely guarded by the Afrikaner nationalists and the NP. In those

years characterised by fear and paranoia, the preservation of an alleged homo-

geneous Afrikaner cultural identity occurred through a number of both legal

and secret organisations (O’Meara 1996:44).

The article will use interviews with former Voelvryers, with erstwhile and

current Yeoville residents and with individuals whose lives revolved around

this neighbourhood in the 1970s and 1980s, combined with newspaper articles

and secondary sources.

Reflections on the relationship between music, identity and politics in Yeo-

ville are situated in that body of literature which has shown that popular

culture, in Africa as elsewhere, can be a tool for changing people’s individual

and collective identities, as well as for bringing about socio-political changes

(Fair 2001; Akyeampong & Ambler 2002:1–16). Not only is music ‘a key to

identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the

subjective in the collective’ (Frith 1996:109), but popular music in Africa has

been used since precolonial times as a ‘specific kind of social action’ (Water-

man 2002:19), and to praise or challenge those in power: what could not be

expressed in a speech was to a greater extent allowed in a sung form (see

Vail & White 1983; Waterman 1990; Turino 2000). The political potential of

performance, however, does not lie in the poetic licence per se, but in the

very networks made possible by the performance: brought together by the per-

formance, people can learn about certain ideas and goals (see Ranger 1975;

Strobel 1976; Geiger 1997; Askew 2002). During colonialism, different forms

of utterance, along with the networks they enabled, contributed to spreading

new political ideas in various African contexts. After independence, open

oppositional messages carried in songs have often been repressed and musicians

Music, Anti-apartheid Identities 405

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punished, for leaders were aware of both the transformative power of the ideas

spread by song texts and the threat represented by the networks created by the

performance.

Pioneering scholarly works on music performance in South Africa have

mainly focused on black music before, during and after apartheid. Black town-

ship music was first documented in detail by David Coplan in his book In Town-

ship Tonight! ([1985] 2007).4 Christopher Ballantine’s important work (1991,

1993) has shown the politicisation and potentially progressive social role

played by early jazz known as marabi (for contemporary songs, identity and

power in South Africa, see Gunner 2009). However, there exists relatively

scant published scholarly literature on protest music composed and performed

by white South Africans. New genres in Afrikaner music such as Musiek en

Lyriek (music and lyrics), which arose in the late 1970s and was led by a

handful of folk rockers who were trying to get their audience to think about

the social reality they were living in, have been analysed by Muff Andersson

in an early study (1981; see also de Vos 1990:27). Brendan Jury has examined

the extent to which compulsory conscription for white males shaped white

South African (particularly Afrikaner) masculinities during apartheid, and how

military violence affected the lyrics and the stylistic aspects of Voelvry songs,

characterised by ‘parody and pastiche’ used as ‘a call for radical social

change’ (1996:102). Michael Drewett (2002) has concentrated on satire, meta-

phors and double entendre as consciousness-raising tools deployed by four

white male artists (three performing during apartheid, and one afterwards) to

bypass the heavy censorship exercised by the South African Broadcasting Cor-

poration (SABC). He claims that satire was not always effective, as sometimes

the audience did not understand the subtle messages sent by the artists. In a

seminal article on Voelvry, Albert Grundlingh (2004) has compared this move-

ment to the cultural revolution which occurred in the West in the 1960s, provid-

ing a convincing explanation as to why Afrikaans anti-apartheid protest music in

South Africa emerged two decades later, at the same time analysing the extent

to which this movement really ‘rocked the boat’. By employing a hermeneutic

semiology, Leswin Laubscher has examined the music of Voelvry artist

Johannes Kerkorrel, arguing that ‘[t]he Voelvry generation . . . enacted an iden-

titary and individuating battle, first and foremost against the law and name of

the father, and only secondarily against the (apartheid) law of the land as the

father’s creation’ (2005:324). In 2006 Pat Hopkins published an appealing

non-academic book and related DVD on Voelvry. More recently, the release

of multi-awarded 2013 documentary ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ by Malik Bend-

jelloul has given rise to a new debate that touches upon Voelvry, providing sig-

nificant insights. The journal Safundi (2013) has hosted a roundtable on this

documentary, responsible for sparking a ‘rediscovery’ among white South Afri-

cans of pop music icon Sixto Rodriguez and nostalgic memories of an (often-

claimed) anti-apartheid past. The documentary’s stance that the emergence of

the Voelvry music scene was a result of Rodriguez’s presence in South Africa

406 African Studies 7(3) December 2015

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has been scrutinised in a heated academic discussion. While Simon Lewsen

depicts the film as having overstated ‘the importance of Voelvry in the

broader South African narrative’ (2013:461), and Michael Titlestad argues

that the Voelvry tour is ‘a phenomenon mythologized out of all cultural and pol-

itical proportion’ (2013:467), Jonathan Hyslop credits Voelvry and the End Con-

scription Campaign (ECC), both seen as ‘products of the global counterculture’,

with having played an active role in weakening ‘the ideological and organiz-

ational hold of PW Botha’s regime in limited but significant ways’ (2013:498).

In his book, Hopkins (2006:81) indicates in passing the shift of the rock ’n

roll scene to Rockey Street (Yeoville) in the late 1970s. In Grundlingh’s analy-

sis, the Black Sun theatre in Yeoville is mentioned, though briefly, as central in

the making of Voelvry, especially in its initial stages (2004:486; see also

Hopkins 2006:124). Building on these insights, this article provides further

reflections on the role of Yeoville, its Rockey Street and the Black Sun, claim-

ing that these places played a key role in the early stages of Voelvry, and more

generally in guaranteeing artists and their audiences a great deal of freedom of

expression. This article argues that the Black Sun, together with other nightclubs

in which anti-apartheid music was performed, made music in Yeoville one of

the:

‘tactics’ of subtle opposition that emerge from within the cultural spaces governed and

controlled by others, occurring . . . in the private spaces of home, in the corners of the

night-time economy, beyond the panoptic gaze of the state. (Connell & Gibson

2003:16)5

Although Voelvry performances in Yeoville have been mentioned in some of

the aforementioned works and in some artists’ autobiographies (as well as in

some unpublished dissertations and papers; see for instance Dewar 2011), this

article adds to previous scholarship by emphasising the centrality of Yeoville to

the Voelvry movement: in this neighbourhood artists found a ‘safe environment’

thanks to the presence of an already established community of counterculture indi-

viduals from various backgrounds, whose main common ground was condemna-

tion of apartheid. The decline of Voelvry, which can be linked to the South African

political context of the early 1990s (see Grundlingh 2004), was parallel to the

decline of various key entertainment spaces located in Yeoville.

In addition, through the use of new oral sources, this article reconstructs the

views on Voelvry in Yeoville expressed by former Voelvryers and by alternative

white Anglophones. Their memories reveal that counterculture whites deliberately

chose different music genres and entertainment venues in Rockey Street. Despite

their ideological similarities, English-speaking people sometimes kept a conven-

tional view of their Afrikaner counterparts. Therefore, to a minor extent this article

will contest those perceptions, widespread in the popular imagination and in some

nostalgic memories of former Yeoville residents, of this neighbourhood as a space

where diverse racial, class and social groups formed a tight-knit anti-apartheid

community.

Music, Anti-apartheid Identities 407

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Yeoville as an Alternative Space

What characterises Yeoville, and its high street (Rockey/Raleigh) in particular, is

the rich layering; most notably spatially and historically. This is a result of the

suburb being developed prior to the advent of professional planning (as

opposed to where neighbourhoods were preconceived, or planned in entirely),

through what David Dewar and Roelof Uytenbogaardt (circa 1976:8) have aptly

termed an ‘evolutionary’, or ‘ecological’ process of development, that is, a par-

ticular kind of urban development that slowly conferred on Yeoville its

dynamic urban quality. This feature of Yeoville may constitute the background

of, and precondition for, the development of a vibrant alternative culture from

the 1970s onwards. The emergence of Yeoville as a sort of ‘bohemian enclave’

was an indirect and unwanted result of the apartheid government’s planning

policy of decentralisation and expansion of Johannesburg, which started in the

mid-1970s and went on into the 1980s. Clive Chipkin (2008:128, 190) has

described how the ‘apartheid city’ underwent this change in an initial effort to

decrease pollution, congestion and high land values in the central business district

(CBD). Until then, the hub of urban sociability and entertainment had been the

CBD, namely, Joubert Park and Hillbrow, which were widely populated by

young white residents. The mid-1970s saw increasing movement from the CBD

into Yeoville.

The musical history of Yeoville has been intrinsically linked to the many small

shops, restaurants and courtyards which front onto Yeoville’s high street. Specific

attention is paid to the urban fabric of two blocks which front onto Rockey Street,

between Cavendish and Bezuidenhout streets. It is here that some of the oldest

Yeoville buildings, such as Scotch Corner and Solomon’s Building, both com-

pleted in the 1920s, are located (Dewar 2011). These two blocks formed the

spatial core of the white anti-apartheid culture and music scene between the

1970s and early 1990s. It is essential to remark that, despite the fact that most

clubs along Rockey Street targeted primarily white youths, they saw the presence

as well of a minority of black audiences and artists.6

The urban quality of Yeoville, with this spatial layering, has given rise to the

type of spatial and social environment which fostered then, as it does nowadays,

cross-cultural interaction between people of different backgrounds. White alterna-

tive residents and habitues – both Afrikaans- and English-speaking – co-existed

here with a Jewish community that had established itself since the suburb was

founded in the 1890s,7 as well as with blacks, among whom was a core of anti-

apartheid activists.

According to Liz Kirsten, who lived in Yeoville between 1976 and 1993, the

first wave of white youths moving into Yeoville was made up of English-speaking

university students in their 20s. Their movement towards Yeoville occurred

through word of mouth:

I think people chose Yeoville because it was close to Wits [the University of the Wit-

watersrand]. I’d never heard of Yeoville before a friend of mine had invited me to his

408 African Studies 7(3) December 2015

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house. He lived on the corner of Raleigh Street and Cavendish and then I met other

students who were staying in the area. So the first [time] that I heard of Yeoville

was through friends of mine who were students.8

This growing influx of university students from the mid-1970s slowly made

Yeoville the centre of a youthful counterculture, which demarcated this area in

the following decades. Along with this went the establishment of places of enter-

tainment run by alternative white men. Maurice Smithers, an activist and Yeoville

resident since the 1970s, recalls that it was the opening of Cafe Casablanca, a

small club on Rockey Street run by music producer Patrick van Blerk in the

mid-1970s, which made progressive white Johannesburg residents turn their atten-

tion to Yeoville. La Tortu, at 8 Rockey Street, was another early entertainment

spot. Smithers describes it as:

One of the first places you could get a drink . . . It was a u-shaped building that was

around a central square with a fountain.9

The very u-shaped typology might have lent itself to the establishment of social

gathering spaces for the wave of young people who were moving into Yeoville.

Rumours, a jazz club started in 1979 by Art Kelly and Howard Libson at 24

Rockey Street, hosted a mainly white – and to a lesser extent, black – clientele.

In what was otherwise just ‘a dark and smoky club’,10 Rumours became an ‘exclu-

sive heaven’ (Greef 2004), an influential institution of the counterculture scene in

Yeoville. Specialising in jazz performances, this club soon became connected to

the first wave of English-speaking self-perceived counterculture whites who

settled there in the 1970s. Liz Kirsten’s words convey a sense of the distinctive-

ness, if not elitism, of this multiethnic venue:

[The doormen] would always look through the peephole and if they knew you, or if

you looked OK, they would let you in. If there was a new doorman, they’d have to

go and call Art or Howard who worked behind the bar and they would say: ‘She’s

OK, she can come in.’ . . . It was just a bar; I don’t know why it had such an ambience.

I think it was just the people that went there. There were a lot of actors and musicians,

but I don’t know what the draw card was exactly; it was definitely the people [who

frequented] and the people that ran the bar. (Dewar 2011)11

The creation of further nightclubs in Rockey Street – along with the development

of this strip as the hub of a youthful and alternative cultural identity – began to

intensify from the mid-1980s onwards, when young Afrikaners also made Yeo-

ville their home. They were mostly educated, middle-class young adults in their

late 20s and early 30s, and were no longer students.12 A common rejection of

the monolithic Afrikaner cultural and political establishment was one of the

main reasons that brought alternative whites into one neighbourhood. However,

oral evidence suggests that English- and Afrikaans-speakers maintained their

divisions.

Music, Anti-apartheid Identities 409

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The Emergence of Voelvry in the South African Context

In conjunction with the ‘appropriation’ of Yeoville by alternative Afrikaners from

the mid-1980s onwards, this suburb came to play a crucial role in a short-lived but

significant Afrikaans artistic and social movement which started to gather momen-

tum in the late 1980s. Initially dubbed by the media the ‘Alternative Afrikaans

Music Movement’ (Emerson & Getz 1989; Prendini Toffoli 1989) after the nation-

wide ‘Voelvry tour’ (as musicians themselves named it) of 1989, this movement

and related music genre soon came to be known as Voelvry.13 The tour brought

great popularity to the Voelvry musicians, to such an extent that in 1990 some

of them had an opportunity to perform in the Netherlands. Conflicts would soon

arise among the artists, and a number started to pursue solo careers.

The musical roots of Voelvry are to be found in the late 1970s South African

rock scene, centred in the East Rand town of Springs. Among those artists who

played a key role in the Voelvry movement was James Phillips, a member of

the Springs-based ‘Springs punk’ band, Corporal Punishment, which rebelliously

complained about topics ranging from apartheid and conscription to ‘white subur-

ban life and commercialism’ (Hopkins 2006:79).

Although Voelvry musicians originated from various places across South Africa

and did not first meet in Yeoville, their earliest performances took place largely in

Rockey Street. Significantly, the first alternative Afrikaans rock concert in the

country was planned for the Yeoville Recreation Centre in 1988 and this was pre-

ceded by an active rock ’n roll scene in Rockey Street from the mid- to late 1970s

onwards. As a former Voelvry artist recalls:

During the Voelvry tour and before, we were all based in Yeoville. Our consciousness

was shaped by the small Yeoville subculture.14

Here Voelvryers found an already established community of socially and politi-

cally progressive people from various racial and social backgrounds, whose main

common ground was condemnation of apartheid. The Yeoville environment

encouraged the creative expression and redefinition of counterculture Afrikaner

identities. It was in Yeoville, while listening to Corporal Punishment, that

Lloyd Ross decided to set up the renowned anti-apartheid label Shifty Records

(Hopkins 2006:81; see also Grundlingh 2004:486). Created in 1982, Shifty

would later record all the Voelvry music and would play a role in shaping the

bands and their listeners into what would become a social movement. In the

1980s, most of the band members and solo musicians lived in Yeoville and its sur-

rounding suburbs such as Berea and Hillbrow.

Voelvry was preceded by and arose out of a particular set of social and political

circumstances.15 Politically speaking, the 1980s were a period of rapid change,

during which ‘an organic crisis of hegemony emerged’ (Laubscher 2005:310).

These years have been defined as ‘South Africa’s decade of destiny’ in which a

tidal wave of resistance ‘finally brought to a political deadlock that foreshadowed

the collapse of white minority rule’ (Gerhart & Glaser 2010:3). During the 1960s

410 African Studies 7(3) December 2015

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protest music was repressed by the intensive segregationist efforts of the govern-

ment and many anti-apartheid musicians and activists had to move abroad; but the

1980s saw a remarkable revitalisation of popular culture (Grundlingh 2004:487;

also see Ballantine 1989:308). If at the outset of the 1980s the government still

had firm control, by the end ‘the balance of power had decisively shifted’

(Gerhart & Glaser 2010:3). As the decade unfolded, prime minister PW Botha

had to enforce the so-called totaaleaanslag (total onslaught), a strategy of

control and repression which represented a final desperate attempt by the Afrika-

ner NP government to hold onto power. Botha and his ‘securocrats’ – as the oppo-

sition press scorned Botha’s security chiefs – intensified internal and border

security measures to an unprecedented degree (Gerhart & Glaser 2010:31; see

also Beinart & Dawson 2010; Beinart & Dubow 1995).

Government repression was increased to meet the wave of resistance that was

sweeping the country. The United Democratic Front (UDF), an umbrella organis-

ation of political groups; the Johannesburg Democratic Action Committee

(JODAC), formed by ‘white non-student UDF sympathisers’ (Gerhart & Glaser

2010:67); and the ECC were all created in the early 1980s. Although the member-

ship of these associations was multiracial, it was difficult to recruit white

members. While some Afrikaners may have sympathised with the cause of

JODAC and the UDF, joining these organisations was too radical a step for

them; their links to the African National Congress (ANC) were well known

(Gerhart & Glaser 2010:67). On the whole, in those years it was very hard for

an Afrikaner to leave the laager – ‘when you [leave] you are like a traitor’.16 Not-

withstanding the difficulties of entering into politics and departing from the

laager, Afrikaner dissidence was growing in this period. The previous introduc-

tion of television in 1975 had played a role in making Afrikaners’ lifestyles

more outward-looking (Grundlingh 2004:490). In the 1980s, an increasing

section of Afrikaner intellectuals began to show disaffection and disillusionment

with the hegemonic Afrikaner identity as represented by the NP and its supporters.

The 1980s also saw the appearance of the Vrye Weekblad (Free/Independent

Weekly), a progressive anti-apartheid weekly newspaper in Afrikaans (Grun-

dlingh 2004:484, 486, 496; see also Nel 2012).17 Historian Dan O’Meara

(1996:368) argues that at this time ‘Afrikaner society as a whole was etched

with a profound sense of malaise and self-doubt’; most NP politicians did not

dare to face this situation. Laubscher has pointed out that the figure of the Afrika-

ner ‘coalesced as identitary unity around the volkseie (the nation or people’s own;

that which is particular to the Afrikaner)’; the latter was founded ‘on exclusion,

difference, dominance and force’ (2005:311). It was in this context, in which

there were very few options for Afrikaans anti-apartheid political protest, that

Voelvry emerged. Indeed, ‘[t]he choice of music as a vehicle of Afrikaans disen-

chantment took place in the absence of other overt forms of specifically Afrikaans

anti-apartheid political protests’ (Grundlingh 2004:490).

The key events that had a profound impact on Afrikaner consciousness were the

Border wars of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the conscription laws imposed

Music, Anti-apartheid Identities 411

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from the late 1960s. Many of those who would become Voelvry musicians had

been conscripted in the 1970s (see Phillips 2002:72; Baines 2003; Grundlingh

2004; Conway 2012; Cherry 2013). The conscription experience had a special sig-

nificance to Voelvry artists to the extent that it would form the subject matter of

one of the anthems of Voelvry: Hou My Vas Korporaal (Hold me Tight, Corporal)

– for the lyrics, see Grundlingh 2004:512; see also Hopkins 2006:46–7. These

internal processes should not, however, give the impression that Voelvry was a

parochial movement with no outward influence.18 As Hyslop argues:

the interaction between South African youth and global [US and European] counter-

culture[s] from the late 1960s through the 1980s was not an unimportant phenomenon.

Though no doubt it is true that many young whites enjoyed rock music without ever

asking political questions, the counterculture was seen as an ideological threat by the

apartheid regime, and did play a role in the radicalization of small but politically

important groups of activists. (2013:493)

It was Lekker to be in Yeoville

Yeoville, with its distinctive socio-political landscape, provided a formative

experience for the Voelvry musicians and their listeners. Corne Coetzee, who

was based in Yeoville for five years in the 1980s, describes her own experience

of ‘disenchantment’ as follows:

That was the time – maybe five years, ten years before Voelvry – when Afrikaans

people maybe became aware of identity and rejecting it. I never thought about my

identity as an Afrikaans speaker or Afrikaner or whatever, until I wanted to leave

the laager. Or [just] started to do it – I didn’t want to, I just realised I wasn’t thinking

like these people [in power]. When I started thinking, at age maybe 22, I realised I

didn’t think like them, and that was a few years before Voelvry came when one just

opened up. . . . Some Afrikaans people started opening up and thinking about their

identity and rejecting the Afrikaner thing. There was a lot of debate about ‘what is

an Afrikaner’ . . . 19

For many Afrikaners, the process of leaving the laager did not result in adher-

ence to a political organisation; they rather resorted to departing from the domi-

nant and oppressive Afrikaner identity. Corne’s husband, Hans Pienaar, who

also lived in Yeoville in the 1980s, stated that the rejection of this oppressive iden-

tity went as far as to refuse the use of the term ‘Afrikaner’, as it had hegemonic

overtones. In his words:

The idea was started that you should not call yourself an Afrikaner because it’s a

totally political [concept]. At that time our sort of thing was we’re not interested in

ethnic identities so we didn’t think further. We rejected the Afrikaner identity and

that’s where it stopped and then we did other things like literature, music and so on

. . . I’m still very uncomfortable calling myself an Afrikaner because I still see it as

very much a political thing.20

While insisting that they too were Afrikaners, or rather calling themselves

‘Afrikaans-speakers’, dissidents tried in various ways to voice the belief that

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South Africa was not the God-given preserve of the Afrikaner volk, but belonged

to all who lived in it, irrespective of the colour of their skin (O’Meara 1996:368;

see also Grundlingh 2004). Aware of being ostracised, many found a place of

comfort, acceptance and mutual sustenance in Yeoville.21 For Harry Kalmer,

who was based in Yeoville in the late 1980s, ‘it was the first time that I was sur-

rounded by other people like me’.22 As Liz Kirsten has succinctly put the matter:

‘There were a lot of like-minded people living in one place, so it was unique in that

way . . . It had an essence about it; living in a community of like-minded people’.23

Apart from its appeal as a space where ostracised whites could meet others with a

similar worldview and form a community, Yeoville is remembered by Sanpat

Kalmer, in a rather nostalgic fashion, as:

. . . a fun place to be; it’s a pity because we need places like that. There were shops,

you could walk down the road – literally get out of your flat, walk two blocks and go

and have something to eat, go and listen to music . . . there was a movie house that

showed [European film festivals] twice a year. Everything was there down the road

and you would meet so many people . . . You would run into so many people that

you knew. It was nice. It was nice to live there; it was like a little village. And

people would come from outside because it was fun; to have fun. You know it was

lekker [cool] to be there. And it was the only place that you would see actually a

mixing of people.24

Koos Kombuis goes as far as to maintain that in Yeoville: ‘being Afrikaans

wasn’t a thing. We were not really aware of ethnic differences. Yeoville was

one of the few melting-pot type places in the old South Africa’.25 Although

there was only one black person (also the only woman) involved in Voelvry

music (for insights on Voelvry as a masculine and sexist space, see Grundlingh

2004:486, 496–7),26 Voelvry artists were eager to perform for multiracial audi-

ences, and played alongside bands that included black members. When the Johan-

nesburg city council banned black musicians from playing – and black audiences

from attending – the first alternative Afrikaans rock concert to be held at the Yeo-

ville Recreation Centre in 1988, Boogy Gottsman, one of the concert organisers,

cancelled the gig as a sign of protest. His decision was fully supported by the

Voelvryers. Artist Johannes Kerkorrel was quoted as saying: ‘I will not perform

in a place under such circumstances’ (Molzen 1988). This was a clear objection

to the city council’s decision to prevent black people from playing at the Yeoville

Recreation Centre and attending this non-racial concert – which would have seen

South African bands like National Wake (which included two black members)

performing side by side with Afrikaner artists.

The Black Sun, Mockery and Anarchy

Along Rockey Street there were a number of popular venues such as the Harbour

Cafe,27 but the space that came to be associated with Voelvry performances was

the Black Sun, a nightclub and theatre which moved from Berea to Yeoville in

the mid-1980s. Located very close to Rumours, owned by two South Africans

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of Greek descent, the Black Sun would soon become an elected venue for Afri-

kaans-speaking artists and their audiences; it would play a key role in shaping

Voelvry music and movement.28 The first Voelvry cabaret, Ons het vir U ’n Kabar-

etgemaak (We have made a cabaret for you) written in 1986 by Irna van Zyl and

Ralph Rabie, was performed for the first time at the Black Sun in 1987. The fol-

lowing year ‘Johannes Kerkorrel’ (born Ralph Rabie) and ‘Andre Letoit’ (born

Andre Le Roux Du Toit) created a second cabaret, Piekniek by Dingaan (Picnic

at Dingaan), also performed at the Black Sun.29 Even when later on both artists

turned to rock ’n roll and stopped using the cabaret as a vehicle for expression,

they still chose the Black Sun as their venue (see Hopkins 2006:160-2).30 Kerkor-

rel has explicitly acknowledged the role of this theatre in promoting his work, as

well as in enhancing Johannesburg’s alternative anti-apartheid white culture:

I have a lot of respect for the Black Sun. No other theatre would have been able to

present work like ours. It taught me how important a domestic theatre venue can

be, allowing anyone to say anything in any language and the management doesn’t

worry. It’s also important that we weren’t part of the ordinary Afrikaner theatre or cul-

tural structures. It was completely alternative. As such it made an invaluable contri-

bution to the culture of Johannesburg. The actors could drop the mask completely

and that was the cabaret.31

It is worth noting that stage names represented jocular versions of typical Afri-

kaner names (see Grundlingh 2004:486). This indicates Voelvryers’ flippant

stance, which mocked the serious attitude of nationalist Afrikaners (Byerly

1998:20). Andre Le Roux Du Toit changed his name into Andre Letoit and then

Koos Kombuis. ‘Letoit’ is an anagram for ‘toilet’.32 ‘Koos’ (short for Jacobus)

was chosen because it is a common Afrikaner male name, while ‘Kombuis’ appar-

ently originated from his short experience as an occupier of the kitchen of a drug

dealer friend (Dowson 1989:10–1). But the reference to a kitchen was also a sar-

castic allusion to the Afrikaans language, once known as a ‘kitchen language’.33

Johannes Kerkorrel – literally ‘John Church Organ’, from the name of a trade-

mark Dutch organ – explained his choice of pseudonym as follows:

Johannes Kerkorrel came from a shop in Goodwood in the Cape. As I passed by I saw

the name and thought: that’s surely the ultimate fucked up Calvinist idiot you can be.

(Hopkins 2004:128; see also Grundlingh 2004:486)

Kerkorrel was also the lead singer and keyboardist of the Die Gereformeerde

Blues Band (The Reformed Blues Band): the name did not refer to the style per-

formed by the band (which was not blues); it rather aimed to deride the Afrikaner

Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church).

Apart from adopting mocking stage names, Voelvry artists wrote biting lyrics.

For example, Kombuis’s and Kerkorrel’s first cabaret included ‘Swart September’

(Black September), composed in 1987. Probably referring to the Vaal uprising of 3

September 1984, a key event which marked the beginning of massive township

violence,34 this song subverted the lyrics of the Afrikaner National Anthem,

while appropriating its tune. Here are some excerpts:

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Plant vir my ’n Namibsroos

Verafgelee Welwitschia

Hervestig hom in Hillbrow

En doop hom Khayelitsha

September is die mooiste,

mooiste maand

Viooltjies in die voorhuis

En riots ooral die land

Die swarte sonder pas

O, die swarte sonder pas

Skuifel langs die mure

Red sy eie bas

( . . . )

Die tyres het gebrand

Daar by Manenberg se kant

Al die volk was hoenderkop

Die Casspirs vol R-4s gestop

En die vrou by die draad

Het eerste die gedruis gehoor

Tjank maar, Ragel, oor jou kind

Die bliksems het hom doodgemoer

( . . . )

Oor ons afgebrande skole

Met die kreun van honger kinders

Dis die stem van al die squatters

Van ons land, Azania

Ons sal traangas, ons sal Treurnicht

Ons sal offer wat jy vra

Ons sal dobbel in Sun City

Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika

[Plant me a Namib rose

Remote Welwitschia

Replant it in Hillbrow

And christen it Khayelitsha

September is the most beautiful,

Beautiful month

Violets in the living room

And riots across the land

The black without a pass

Oh, the black without a pass

Shuffles along the wall

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Rescues his own arse

( . . . )

The tyres burnt35

There by Manenberg

All the people were drunk

The Casspirs loaded with R-4s36

And the woman at the fence

Was the first to hear the roar

Weep, Rachel, for your child

The bastards killed him

( . . . )

Over our burnt-down schools

With the groans of hungry children

It’s the call of all the squatters

Of our land, Azania

We shall teargas, we will not mourn37

We shall give you what you ask

We shall gamble at Sun City

We for you South Africa.]

(Hopkins 2006:132–3; translated by Hopkins)

The result of this simultaneously oppositional and satirical music was that the

cabaret was banned on the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), now the University

of Johannesburg (UJ), campus on the grounds that its style was disrespectful as it

used blasphemous words and ‘impure’ Afrikaans (Hopkins 2006:131–2).

An excerpt from ‘Energie’ (Energy), written by Kerkorrel and performed by

Die Gereformeerde Blues Band in Yeoville, as well as during the nationwide

tour, exemplifies what the Voelvryers were rejecting:

Jy moet staan in jou ry

Jy moet jou hare kort sny

Jy moet altyd netjies bly

Jy moet al die pryse kry

Jy moet in ’n huisie bly

Trou en kinders kry

In jou karretjie ry-y-y-y-y

En stem vir die party

Ek se nee dis ’n mors

Ek se nee dis ’n mors

Ek se nee dis ’n mors

’n mors van energie

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( . . . )

Kom ons probeer anargie

Ons is moeg van apatie

Ons probeer anargie

Soek ’n nuwe energie

Energie, energie

Energie, energie

Ons kry weer energie

[You must stand in line

You must cut your hair short

You must always be neat

You must win all the prizes

You must live in a little house

Marry and have children

Drive in your small car

And vote for the party

I say no it’s a waste

I say no it’s a waste

I say no it’s a waste

a waste of energy

( . . . )

come let’s try anarchy

we’re tired of apathy

we’ll try anarchy

search for a new energy]

(translation by Hopkins 2006:76–7; excerpts also in Jury 1996:108)

In ‘Swart Transvaal’, Koos Kombuis boldly scorned the Boer nation, going as

far as encouraging the Afrikaners to sing a lullaby of anarchy:

Ondergronds is God die hel in

Vie die Boerenasie

Wat bid soos Fariseer

Maar nooit kan ophou raas nie

Afrinakers, vroueslaners,

Doemprofete en kritici

Kom vergader hier en sing

Nou saam

Dies wiegelied van anargie

Afrikaners, babaslaners,

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Skisofrene en politici

Kom vergader hier en sing

Nou saam

Die wiegelied van anargie

[Underground God is fuming

With the Boer nation

Who pray like Pharisee

But always squabble and disagree

Afrikaners, wife-beaters,

Prophets of doom and critics

Come gather round

And sing

A lullaby of anarchy

Afrikaners, baby bashers,

Schizophrenics and politicians

Come gather round

And sing a lullaby of anarchy.]

(Hopkins 2006:100; translation by Hopkins)

These two excerpts suggest that underlying Voelvry was the evocation of a

sense of anarchy. Rather than being a case of mere outward appearance, this

anarchy was constructed consciously as a political intervention. The appeal was

immense but the promotion of anarchy was perhaps what eventually led to the

rapid demise of the movement, and it is to this theme that we now turn.

Rock ’n Roll against Calvinism

According to Hermann Giliomee, ‘to be an Afrikaner, someone had to subscribe to

a Calvinist and conservative world view’ (1992:347). Former Yeoville resident

Sanpat Kalmer attributes the popularity of Voelvry more to the vital need to

defy Calvinism than apartheid itself. In his view, the repressive Calvinist mental-

ity and institutions were among the central aspects that the Voelvry musicians and

their listeners were resisting:

More so than the politics of apartheid, I think maybe that came with it, but the oppression

of the Calvinism – you can’t have fun, you can’t dance, don’t smile [too much], you

know, don’t have too much fun – that’s kind of sin – I think that really got to people.38

Journalist Shaun de Waal (2006:12) has explained the cultural ‘mission’ of

Voelvry in a similar way:

[What] young Voelvry-supporting Afrikaners (and others) were trying to escape from

[was] the suffocating claustrophobia of the Calvinist values and social repressions that

underpinned Afrikaner society and, indeed, seeped into Anglophone South Africa.

The Voelvyers irreverently despised those Calvinist values that were supposedly

fundamental to the Afrikaner nation and were taken very seriously by the estab-

lishment. In the late 1980s they represented a relatively large and certainly

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growing section of the Afrikaans-speaking population that was anti-apartheid and

socially unconventional. Sanpat’s husband, Harry Kalmer, maintains that the

importance of Voelvry lies in the fact that it helped circulate alternative Afrikaner

ideas throughout South Africa, also reaching those young Afrikaners who had not

been exposed to those socio-political progressive ideas that could circulate in

places like Yeoville. In his words:

I think [Voelvry] had curiosity value for people who weren’t thinking about apartheid.

I mean people like us – I mean we were so alienated from Afrikaans by then, because

of the army, because of apartheid, because of the ECC – I mean apartheid and Afri-

kaans was so suspect in our minds . . . So I think it had significance to people in Kroon-

stad, you know, like [journalist, writer and playwright from Stellenbosch] Dana

Snyman wrote about it so beautifully when someone was dismissive about his [Hop-

kins’s] book. Dana said he didn’t have friends who, like [him], smoked dagga and

hung out in trendy places, for him as a oke [dude] from Ventersdorp it was quite

major . . . I think it mobilised people in RAU and Stellenbosch.39

Sanpat Kalmer adds that:

If you look at it in retrospect, there is always that kind of thing – small movement –

that is a sign of the time, of something that’s brewing . . . So whatever the content was,

if maybe not now – it was at the time – that significant, but the fact that people found

a home where they felt comfortable, where they could protest, where . . . they could

escape into that which was away from what was acceptable in the Afrikaans

society – in that way I think it was very significant.40

If music-making helps people find release, during the performances of Voelvry,

Afrikaans-speaking audiences who identified themselves with the message trans-

mitted by the humorous lyrics, could physically let go, without conforming to the

rules that the state, the church and parents were constantly seeking to impose.

Thus, they could publicly challenge the repressive dominant Afrikaner identity

and, indirectly, the apartheid system. As Dagga-Dirk Uys (Andre Letoit’s

manager and organiser of the tour) once put it:

We are bringing home a lot of those homeless people who have never been able to

identify with the current state of Afrikaans culture . . . what seems to be happening

is that instead of Afrikaners being lumped together as one cultural mass with the

same tastes a polarisation of attitudes is developing, with the far right on the one

side and us on the other. (Uys, quoted in Rathbone 1989)

Although Voelvry musicians were by no means the first in South Africa to

perform rock ’n roll in Afrikaans, nor were they the first to play rock ’n roll in

the country, they pioneered the use of this genre as a way of shifting their

own perceptions of the world and the stereotyped views of Afrikaners held

by some non-Afrikaners (for early reception of rock ’n roll in South Africa,

see Hamm 1988). Journalist Charles Leonard is a former Voelvry fan who lived

in Yeoville in the early 1990s, when he was a music journalist for the Vrye

Weekblad. This is his insightful testimony about Voelvry musicians’ use of rock

’n roll:

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I think they were [rather] the first guys to do it that way, in that type of rock format,

you know, not just deep, glasses of red wine type of thing – serious rock ’n roll. You

can go and dance to it and you can hear the chorus and you can shout along to the

chorus.41

At the time, Johannes Kerkorrel and Andre Letoit themselves (prior to the for-

mation of their musical acts, they were working respectively as a journalist and

as a poet and novelist) reflected upon their choice to use rock ’n roll as the

medium of expression for their views. Johannes Kerkorrel once explained that:

look if you say certain things in Afrikaans and you are not supposed to say it, you

don’t ever get the chance to say it because the media is controlled to the extent that

it is. So that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing and using rock ’n roll or whatever.

(Dowson & du Plessis 1989)

Rock ’n roll as a genre allowed resistance to oppression and creation of a commu-

nal space of expression. It seems that the Gereformeerde Blues Band was well

received by a number of non-Afrikaners: this stemmed from its quest to ‘demytho-

logise the Afrikaner’, as Koos Kombuis once argued in an interview. As Johannes

Kerkorrel stated during the same interview:

Afrikaners is plesierig [Afrikaners are cool]. You don’t have to deny being Afrikaans

to be a liberal. The Gereformeerde Blues Band is about having fun, about Afrikaner

pride, about the passion and the laughter of the Afrikaners. (Allan 1989)

Des Latham, who attended some of their Yeoville concerts in the late 1980s,

believes:

a lot of the bigoted English speakers completely did a 180 on the spot from believing

that all Afrikaners were illiberal and unable to recognize the fact that there should be

change.42

Therefore in the late 1980s Voelvry musicians appealed to the growing number

of open-minded Afrikaners and deliberately attempted to shift some of the ways in

which non-Afrikaners perceived Afrikaner culture. This was largely made poss-

ible by the free environment and venues provided by Yeoville.

Rumours, the Black Sun and the Shaping of Separate Identities

Those alternative English- and Afrikaans-speaking individuals whose lives

revolved around Yeoville concurred in their rejection of the oppressive Afrikaner

cultural establishment and apartheid system. To some extent, it was precisely this

that brought them into the same neighbourhood. Notwithstanding the fact that they

were ‘like-minded’, they did not necessarily form a ‘community’.

As far as the Anglophone whites – either residents, or habitual visitors, of Yeo-

ville – are concerned, they were not completely willing to share the same venues

with their Afrikaans-speaking fellows. Although some interviewees recall the

presence at the Black Sun and Rumours of both English- and Afrikaans-speaking

habitues,43 some point to the fact that Die Gereformeerde Blues Band, and more

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generally Voelvry music and cabarets, did not appeal much to English-speakers.44

Why? It may be argued that South Africans of British descent were relatively free

from the oppressive Calvinist state, church and family pressures – the concept of

volkseie did not quite apply to them. Also, linguistic factors should not be ignored:

the majority of English-speakers understood Afrikaans, but they were less pre-

pared to learn and use ‘the language of the oppressor’ than Afrikaners to learn

English. Moreover, according to some interviewees, if Voelvryers revolved

around the Black Sun, the central meeting place for the English-speaking

whites, and for the older Yeoville residents, remained Rumours.45 For Liz

Kirsten this was due to the different tastes of English- and Afrikaans-speakers:

Voelvry did not attract the English-speakers simply because it was not seen by

them as ‘serious music’.46

The different appeal of the two genres, that is, largely jazz and jazz fusion con-

sumed by both English- and Afrikaans-speaking audiences at Rumours, and the

‘non-serious’ punkish rock played by the Voelvryers at the Black Sun and target-

ing Afrikaans-speaking listeners, may be a sign of a broader separation between

the two groups.

In addition, the slight generational gap should be considered. The ‘sophisti-

cated’ jazz played at Rumours might have been used by the English-speaking

slightly older first wave of Yeoville residents to create, reaffirm, and reshape an

identity distinct from the ‘more Afrikaans-speaking’ second wave of Yeoville

residents.47 Although the latter were largely middle-class, educated youths,

during some informal conversations it has emerged that the English-speakers gen-

erally saw themselves as better educated and more refined than their Afrikaner

alternative counterpart.48 For Mandy Dewar, a former habitue of Rumours, the

first wave of residents ‘of English descent’ moved to Yeoville in the 1970s,

while in the 1980s, ‘clubs started to pop up that played music that just did not

appeal to me; I sort of just discounted whatever was going on with them’.49

When asked to elaborate more on her lack of interest in the new venues and in

what was going on there, she stated that the second wave was ‘looked down on a

bit’, and this might have had to do with the fact that it was mostly made up of Afri-

kaners. She further recalls some of those ‘new people’ settling in Yeoville in the

1980s as ‘roughnecks who would walk around barefoot and hassle for coins to buy

dope’.50 Likewise, Liz Kirsten has described this second wave of Yeoville resi-

dents as ‘a different crowd, people who liked heavy drinking and fighting in the

street. We were a cooler crowd, a lot more laid-back, more hippie’.51 Surely,

this crowd would not have been allowed to enter exclusive Rumours.

In most interviews former Yeoville residents held the view that from the mid-

1970s and during ‘the decade of destiny’ Yeoville was a place where people of

different backgrounds broke down barriers through the creation of music. But

these last observations hint at lines of division between the older residents

and those who moved to Yeoville from the mid-1980s onwards, showing that

there was no homogeneity within the white alternative Yeoville music

scene.52 Although in highly racialised apartheid South Africa Yeoville was a

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remarkably unique environment, where the racial laws of apartheid were flouted

and people interacted openly, the undoubtedly significant cultural diversity of

this neighbourhood was accompanied by a significant retention of separate iden-

tities.

The Impact of Voelvry Nationwide and its Decline

To what extent the Voelvryers became ‘the voice of their generation’ is unclear.53

Some studies have shown that in the 1980s the majority of white Afrikaans-speak-

ing students in South Africa still supported the NP and were very much attached to

the Afrikaner nationalism and its symbols, produced and protected by official

institutions that were run by or aligned with the NP government (Giliomee

1992:356).

Whatever the case may be – and there are no studies that would help analyse

more accurately the impact of Voelvry on a larger scale – oral sources illustrate

that the Voelvryers were quite visible and somehow prominent in the late 1980s

counterculture spaces in Johannesburg. However, one should not overemphasise

the impact of Voelvry.

It should be stated at this juncture why Voelvry quickly faded as a music and

social movement. First of all, some artists fought over copyright issues and

aimed to pursue solo careers. Moreover, while insulting apartheid was necessary

for Voelvryers, it could not be sustained in the long run; mockery probably led

some sectors of the anti-apartheid white population to dismiss Voelvry as ‘non-

serious’. Broadly, the end of Voelvry is intertwined with the historical changes

South Africa underwent between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. While in

the mid-1970s more than 90 per cent of Afrikaners still supported the NP, by

1991 their number had dramatically dropped (Giliomee 2003:580). As the NP

was crumbling, and the government had to open a set of negotiations with the

ANC, unban various organisations and ultimately free Mandela, young Afrikaners

may have felt less motivated to resist the government.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overall decline of the white alternative experience

in Yeoville stemmed from drastic shifts in the socio-political circumstances.

These nostalgic excerpts about the closing down of Rumours serve to illustrate

this point: toward the end of the 1980s, ‘Rockey Street was losing its innocence.

Stories were written about it and tourists flocked in’ (Greeff 2004). Parallel to the

modification of this street and its nightclubs:

South Africa also changed, big-time. Democracy came in 1994. Yeoville, which in the

apartheid days was a bastion of non-racialism, a place where many ANC heavy-

weights lived, became a slum and whites started leaving in droves. One Tuesday in

1994, Louis Levy never came to Rumours to play the piano. ‘I found out Lou had

passed away’ [Louis ‘Lou’ Levy was a jazz pianist born in Chicago; he died in

2001], says Howard; ‘I looked at Art [Kelly] and he looked at me, and we both

knew’. We said, ‘That’s it, that’s the end,’ and we closed Rumours that night.

(Greeff 2004, in Dewar 2011)

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Concluding Remarks

Drawing on interviews with former Yeoville residents and Voelvry artists, this

article has furthered previous scholarship by arguing that in the 1980s, the

decade of increasing state repression and growing dissidence against apartheid,

Yeoville provided a formative experience for the Voelvry musicians and their

listeners. In the context of Johannesburg, Yeoville, with its distinctive socio-

political landscape, constituted a particularly suitable environment that fostered

the emergence and expansion of an Afrikaans-speaking counterculture music

scene. By virtue of its urban character, Yeoville was one of the very few

spaces in Johannesburg, and in apartheid South Africa, that allowed some

degree of daily cross-cultural negotiations. Throughout the course of the

1980s, staking a claim to an anti-apartheid identity involved a sense of belong-

ing to a quintessentially alternative neighbourhood. Here young outlawed Afri-

kaners could find a ‘comfortable home’ and meet like-minded people.

Regardless of whether they formed a (rather weak) social movement or were

a ‘loose group affiliation of individuals’, the Voelvryers ‘opened up a cultural

space for young Afrikaners to renegotiate their identities and narratives of

self in a society undergoing transformation’ (Baines 2008:108). Yeoville, with

its venues, afforded Voelvryers freedom of expression, and the clubs in

Rockey Street were particularly conducive spaces where artists could convey

their oppositional messages. In the 1980s, nightclubs such as the Black Sun

were some of the ‘corners of the night-time economy’ that offered a space

for the Voelvry artists to perform, and provided their (predominantly, but not

only) Afrikaner audiences with socially conscious entertainment, i.e. with a

chance to express their opposition to Calvinism, apartheid and racial segregation

while having fun. This article has also added to previous scholarship by high-

lighting that a key feature of the Voelvry movement was a strong sense of

anarchy which was constructed consciously as the only possible political inter-

vention in apartheid South Africa. This, however, eventually contributed to the

rapid demise of the movement. Therefore, ridiculing the enemy, which consti-

tuted one of the main features of Voelvry, was partly a weakness. The fading

of apartheid, visible by the end of the 1980s, facilitated the quick end of

Voelvry.

Finally, the new oral sources presented in this article have revealed the exist-

ence of an underlying separation between the two white counterculture groups

that came into contact in Yeoville. Despite their proximity, venues such as

the Black Sun and Rumours embodied the existence of divisions between the

English-speaking and the Afrikaans-speaking individuals, also visible in the

different musical choices of those who patronised these two clubs: ‘serious-

minded’ jazz versus light-hearted rock-punk Voelvry. Why some aspects of

punk spoke to Afrikaans-speaking musicians and not to Anglophone musicians

is a theme that further research should investigate more carefully.

Music, Anti-apartheid Identities 423

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AcknowledgmentsThis article is based on the second author’s MA dissertation (Pienaar 2012), supervised by Maria

Suriano and Clive Glaser. Some key interviews were conducted by William Dewar, who also com-

piled the CD ‘Down Rockey Street. Music in Yeoville: 1980 to Present’, and wrote the essay on Yeo-

ville ‘Alternative Music in the 1970s, 80s and 90s’ as part of his MA dissertation (Dewar 2011:57–

62). His contribution is gratefully acknowledged. Maria Suriano wishes to thank Liz Gunner for her

helpful comments on an earlier draft and for setting up the reading group ‘Passages of Culture’,

which has had numerous constructive conversations in a friendly environment. Kelly Askew’s

insights on the power of performance, made during a workshop on ‘Performance and Social

Meaning’ held at WISER in 2010, and organised by Liz Gunner, were very valuable.

Note on ContributorsMaria Suriano is a senior lecturer in African History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johan-

nesburg. Her research interests include leisure and politics, and past and present popular culture in

urban Tanzania. Her articles have appeared in a number of edited volumes and journals, including

Africa Today and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Her 2011 article in African Studies was

awarded the first Vilakazi Prize for Young Scholars in African Studies.

Clara Lewis is currently based in the UK. She is a project support coordinator at the Open Data Insti-

tute in London, which was founded by Sirs Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt to promote the use

of open data to create social, economic and environmental value.

Notes1. ‘Afrikaners are cool’.

2. Excerpt from the song Bomskok Babalaas (Shellshock Hangover) by Koos Kombuis (Hopkins

2006:140, translation by Hopkins).

3. Much earlier, the most well-known multiracial spaces in apartheid South Africa were Sophia-

town in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town (see Hannerz 1994). For Alexandra as a

highly politicised black working class township, see Bonner & Nieftagodien 2008.

4. The expanded second edition includes a discussion of recent developments.

5. John Connell and Chris Gibson have particularly emphasised the interconnectedness between

music, identity formation and the spaces in which music is made, performed and received.

6. The term black includes mixed-race or ‘coloured’ people who are not treated here as a different

group.

7. Maurice Smithers (long-term Yeoville resident and activist), interview with William Dewar,

Yeoville, Johannesburg (2 September 2010).

8. Liz Kirsten (former Yeoville resident and a regular at Rumours), interview with William

Dewar, Senderwood and Orange Grove, Johannesburg (24 July 2010 & 14 August 2010).

9. Smithers interview.

10. Kirsten interview.

11. Kirsten interview.

12. Harry Kalmer, Sanpat Kalmer, Hans Pienaar & Corne Coetzee (former Yeoville residents),

interview with Clara Pienaar, Observatory, Johannesburg (4 December 2011). See also Grun-

dlingh 2004:487.

13. Whether or not Voelvry may be deemed a movement remains a contentious issue. While Albert

Grundlingh argues that Voelvry was a social movement, Michael Titlestad sees it as a ‘loose

group affiliation of individuals’. Michael Titlestad (literary scholar, Professor at the University

of the Witwatersrand, Department of English), email communication (27 January 2012). For a

discussion of social movements, and a comparison with earlier similar phenomena in the West,

see Grundlingh 2004.

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14. Email correspondence, Koos Kombuis (born Andre Le Roux Du Toit; former Voelvry artist)

(November – December 2011). For subcultural formations, see Dick Hebdige (1979).

15. It should be underlined that the initial period in which some Afrikaners began to question the

dominant Afrikaner identity stretches back to the 1960s, with the beginning of a literary move-

ment known as the Sestigers. Until those years, Afrikaners’ cultural production remained

strictly controlled. According to O’Meara (1996:368), the Voelvry movement seems to have

overtaken in many ways ‘the attack on the foundations of the very idea of “the Afrikaner”

. . . of the Sestigers in the 1960s’.

16. Sanpat Kalmer interview. A laager can be defined as a protective circle of ox wagons (keeping

the women and children on the inside and armed guards on the outside). It is often used meta-

phorically to describe the protective communal mentality in Afrikaner society.

17. The Vrye Weekblad was founded in 1988 by journalist Max du Preez and became a sponsor of

the Voelvry nationwide tour in 1989. It was forced to close in 1994.

18. Mooney (1998:754) argues that it was after the Second World War that South African ‘youths

became more visible as a social category modeling themselves on new international subcultural

styles’.

19. Corne Coetzee (former Yeoville resident), interview with Clara Pienaar, Auckland Park, Johan-

nesburg (24 September 2011).

20. Hans Pienaar (journalist and former Yeoville resident, Corne Coetzee’s husband), interview

with Clara Pienaar, Auckland Park (6 June 2011) and Observatory, Johannesburg (4 December

2011). In the late 1980s, while based in Yeoville, he worked for the Afrikaans newspaper

Rapport with Johannes Kerkorrel, when the latter was still known by his real name Ralph Rabie.

21. Pienaar interview.

22. Harry Kalmer interview.

23. Kirsten interview.

24. Sanpat Kalmer interview.

25. Kombuis correspondence.

26. The only woman, Tonia Selley (stage name: Karla Krimpelien) would have been classified as

‘coloured’.

27. Some of the Afrikaans-speaking residents of Yeoville declared to prefer this venue. Harry and

Sanpat Kalmer interview.

28. Without denying the role of Hillbrow’s popular venues such as Jameson’s in the formation of

Voelvry, this article claims that Yeoville played a particularly significant role in the popularisa-

tion of the Voelvry message.

29. This cabaret, which soon fell apart because of tensions between the two artists, can be identified

as the artistic expression which set out on a road that would lead to the creation of the Voelvry

movement. Tensions seem to have predated the tour (see also Hopkins 2006:107).

30. In 1984 another artist, James Phillips, had taken on the pseudonym Bernoldus Niemand and

released his first album, which marked the beginning of his influence in Voelvry.

31. Kerkorrel, quoted in Hopkins (2006:125).

32. As Koos Kombuis (2000:164–9) explains in his autobiography, he actually chose this name as a

send-up of Leroux (after the well-known Afrikaans writer Etienne Leroux). He only realised

later, when someone pointed it out, that it was also an anagram of ‘toilet’ (see also Hopkins

2006:107).

33. Before Afrikaans became the official language of the Afrikaners in the early 20th century, it was

deemed to be spoken only by household servants and poor white farmers (Laubscher 2005:314).

For Afrikaans as an African language, see Campbell (2010:174).

34. The Vaal Uprising occurred in several townships in an area known as the Vaal triangle about 35

miles south of Johannesburg; violence lasted several weeks and at least 60 people were killed;

for the first time, ‘army units were dispatched to help police bring the Vaal townships under

control’ (see Gerhart & Glaser 2010:69, 68–71, 338–44).

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35. This refers to the well-known technique of ‘necklacings’.

36. The Casspirs are notorious police and military vehicles.

37. In Afrikaans written as treurnicht, which is a play on the name of the leader of the Conservative

Party Andries Treurnicht, who was formerly deputy minister of Bantu Affairs and Development

at the time of the Soweto riots.

38. Sanpat Kalmer interview.

39. Harry Kalmer interview.

40. Sanpat Kalmer interview.

41. Charles Leonard (former music journalist for the Vrye Weekblad and Voelvry fan), interview

with Clara Pienaar, Auckland Park, Johannesburg (1 December 2011).

42. Des Latham (non-Afrikaner musician and Voelvry fan), interview with Clara Pienaar, Rose-

bank, Johannesburg (22 September 2011).

43. Apparently there were more Afrikaans-speaking in the English-dominated venues than the

other way around. In their informal conversations with Clara Pienaar, Harry and Sanpat

Kalmer, Corne Coetzee and Hans Pienaar shared this view.

44. Interestingly, this perception is mostly held by English-speaking individuals.

45. Kirsten interview.

46. Ibid. See also Frank Raubenheimer (he has been running a pottery business in Rockey Street

since 1994, when he moved from Joubert Park), interview with William Dewar, Yeoville,

Johannesburg (27 July 2010).

47. Mandy and John Dewar (former Yeoville residents), interview with William Dewar, Orange

Grove, Johannesburg (24 July 2010, 5 August 2010, 30 August 2010, 4 September 2010).

48. Mandy Dewar, John Dewar and Liz Kirsten, informal conversation with William Dewar,

Orange Grove, Johannesburg (22 January 2012).

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Kirsten interview.

52. An analysis of the (either real or perceived) differences and divergences between the first and

the second wave of alternative white people is beyond the scope of this article.

53. This expression is borrowed from Hopkins (2006:19).

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