Africa is a Country

Herman Wasserman, my longtime friend and co-conspirator (among others, we’ve co-edited a book about popular culture in South Africa), officially joins Africa is a Country today as a contributor. I’ve posted a few of his missives in the past, but now it is official.

Herman teaches journalism, but he is also a man of letters. He has published a book of short stories and wrote a PhD in comparative literature.

I asked Herman to comment on the music video (above) for the song “Die Verlore Seun” (translate: “The Prodigal Son”) by electro-pop singer Gazelle:

By Herman Wasserman

This is interesting. Perhaps musically not the most exciting work to come from South Africa in recent years, but in terms of what it says about music as a vehicle for the continued engagement with Afrikaans cultural identity this is streets ahead of the slew of B-grade, cheesy Afrikaans music being churned out (even though Afrikaans artists like Steve Hofmeyr display political pretentions).

I read this song as following on the long engagement in Afrikaans literature, prominent since the 1980s in the work of Etienne van Heerden, Koos Prinsloo, Eben Venter and others, but going back to the pathbreaking work of someone like Etienne Leroux in the 1960s, with the farm as a contested space. The younger Afrikaans generation rejected the romanticism, rooted in Afrikaner nationalist politics, of writers like CM van den Heever in the 1930s, by signaling their disillusionment and disgust with the old Afrikaans identities. Yet they were unable to make a complete break with the past even as they saw a move to the city as their only escape (and the city is then again sometimes also constructed in terms of rural metaphors). Their relationship with the farm is a complex mixture of nostalgia, loathing and longing; a paradoxical position somewhere between rejection and affinity.

This song does something similar – the narrator addresses his father (highly significant in terms of the Oedipal complex of the young Afrikaans generation) and apologizes for having deserted the farm for the bright lights of the city. He is back because it is time for the harvest, but you seem him frolicking around with the laborers instead of assuming the role of ‘baas’ handed down to him through the generations.The fact that he seems to side with the laborers on the farm rather than his family, the landowners (who are not to be seen) is an interesting reversal of the colonial gaze which tended to see the landscape as empty and acquired a blindness for the subaltern labor that constructed the rural idyll (see JM Coetzee’s White Writing for a classic analysis)–although the patronizing caption of ‘the lovely people he grew up with’ seems somewhat out of tone.

The title – ‘Verlore Seun’ (Prodigal Son)- has a Biblical resonance as well, again echoing the religious metaphors from Afrikaner nationalist discourse, but now the feelings of Calvinist guilt are undercut by a playful irony, and the son also displays an ambiguous/camp gendered identity. This not just rejection, not just nostalgia – underneath the fun and exuberance, Afrikaans identity is still being negotiated, and it’s often more painful than playful.