Republic or Death! (35 page)

There are plenty of countries that have anthems in multiple languages, of course. Belgium's ‘La Brabançonne' can be sung in French, German or Flemish, while ‘O Canada' is singable in both poetic French or unpoetic English, depending on your preference (the French goes for lines like, ‘Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers'; the English, ‘The True North, strong and free'). But hardly any country seems to have had the confidence to mix multiple languages in a single anthem, as if doing so would undermine the whole project of nation-building – most people expecting a country's citizens to share a common language, after all. Pakistan's anthem, ‘Qaumi Taranah' (‘Blessed be the sacred land, / Happy be the bounteous realm'), is in Urdu even though it's only 8 per cent of the population's first language (it is the lingua franca, admittedly); similarly, Singapore's ‘Majulah Singapura' (‘Onwards, Singapore') is in Malay even though English is the language everyone there communicates in and Chinese dialects are the second most used (it's actually illegal to sing it in anything but Malay). Some countries have even used anthems to try to enforce a single-language policy, notably Sri Lanka, where in 2010 the government tried to ban singing of its anthem in Tamil, the language of 20 per cent of the population including those who fought against it in the country's long-running civil war. It justified the move by saying that ‘in no other country is an anthem sung in more than one language'. Not long after the news became public, journalists asked the government if it had heard of South Africa, but the criticism was ignored, and an unofficial ban went ahead anyway. It was only lifted in 2015.

There is really only one country, in fact, that South Africa could have looked to for inspiration when deciding to adopt a multilingual anthem: Suriname. Its anthem, ‘God Zij Met Ons Suriname' (‘God Be With Our Suriname'), starts with a verse in Dutch, the old colonial language, heavy on lines about tilling soil, before it flows into a verse in Sranan Tongo, heavy on machismo (‘If there's a fight to fight, we shall not be afraid'). But you wouldn't think that one song would be enough to reassure the politician who came up with the idea for South Africa's multilingual anthem that what they were doing was sensible. Two languages seems achievable, but
five
? If I were to ask you to guess who that politician was, you'd only ever give me one answer: Nelson Mandela. And you'd be right – the colossus of South African politics is at the centre of the anthem's story, just as he seems to be at the centre of every story you've heard about this country. But to talk about him now would be to get ahead of myself, because to understand the anthem, the first person you need to know about is someone who died before Mandela was even born.

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Enoch Sontonga is a man it's almost impossible to learn anything about. There are only a couple of photos of him, black-and-whites from the late 1800s. In them, he's in a dapper three-piece suit, a bow tie more thrown than tied around his neck, his moustache looking like it's been waxed to points. He's running the chain of a pocket watch through his hand in one of them and looks more like a gold trader calculating figures than what he really was – a teacher at a Methodist school in what's now Soweto, as poor and unvalued as every other black in the country at that time. No one is clear about what Enoch actually taught at that school, but it's known he ran the choir and that he compulsively wrote songs for it, scribbling ideas down on scraps of paper between lessons. He eventually collected all his efforts into an exercise book, which he hoped to publish, but died before he had a chance to do so, in 1905, aged just thirty-two, of gastroenteritis and a perforated appendix. He was thrown into the black section of Johannesburg's main cemetery, grave number 4,885. The cemetery's records listed him as Enoch Kaffir – christening him with a new surname, the derogatory Afrikaans word for black people. That, essentially, is all there is to say about Enoch; eight short sentences, the most interesting of them about what happened to him after he died.

Soon after arriving in South Africa, I spent an afternoon in Soweto desperately trying to learn more about his life, hoping to at least find the school where he worked so I could flesh out that minimal portrait, but even that proved impossible. I was led around the different parts of Soweto that Enoch might have lived in – Pimville, Nancefield, Klipspruit – by young woman after young woman, all of them holding parasols to protect themselves from the sun, making Soweto seem more like Edwardian England than the teeming city it is. In the end I was dropped off with a middle-aged woman, Olive, who I was told knew more about the area than anyone else. ‘No need to sit down,' she said after hearing why I was there. ‘This won't take long. You're in Soweto. Everything here was bulldozed during apartheid. You won't find a building more than forty years old. Haven't you read no history books?'

However, there is one other fact about Enoch's life that is known. One day in 1897 he grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote ‘Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' on it. It was a short hymn, just a four-line verse in which a choir pray for the Lord to bless Africa, then a two-line chorus in which the singers repeatedly ask for the Holy Spirit to descend. When that chorus is sung, people echo each other until it sounds like hundreds are making the call, not just a handful of schoolchildren (some say Enoch took the melody from the hymn ‘Aberystwyth', but only a Welsh nationalist who hadn't listened to both songs properly would insist on that).

Enoch only intended for the song to be sung by his choir, but the children couldn't keep such a haunting melody to themselves and soon schools and churches across Johannesburg were singing it (some school choirs did tours at the time, which obviously helped). Not long afterwards it was travelling through every Xhosa-speaking community in the country, reaching as far south as Port Elizabeth, as if people were being sent out in ox wagons just to teach it. In 1912, some of the most respected black men in the country met in Bloemfontein to discuss concerns that non-whites were losing the few rights they had. They were especially concerned about the planned Natives Land Act, which intended to ban blacks from owning land in 90 per cent of the country – the first real piece of legislation aimed at creating a formal system of segregation in South Africa. The men formed the South African Native National Congress to fight such laws and at the end of the meeting decided to sing a song together to sum up their hopes and what they wished it could achieve. They sang ‘Nkosi'. By 1925, the SANNC had become the far-better-named African National Congress and ‘Nkosi' had become its anthem.

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Over the next seventy years, ‘Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' was sung at every major event in South African history you might care to name: at times of happiness, of sorrow and of desperation. In 1952, when the ANC launched its first major campaign of civil disobedience, getting people to break any apartheid law they could – such as by using whites-only toilets and ignoring curfews – it was there, sung by people as they were carted off to prison. In 1957, at the Johannesburg bus boycott, it was sung at the end of each day, after people had trudged miles home to their township because they weren't willing to pay inflated fares. The boycott was a success. During the Treason Trial of 1956–61 – the event that brought Nelson Mandela to the world's attention, when he and 155 others were accused of plotting to overthrow the state – it was there too, sung during lunch breaks and echoing around the courthouse when they were finally acquitted. After the ANC and other groups were banned in 1960, it was sung by their members in exile, hundreds of homesick men and women joining in with that chorus and linking training camps in Zimbabwe and Botswana with meeting rooms in London and New York. As the anti-apartheid struggle grew more violent in the seventies and eighties, ‘Nkosi' was sung every Saturday, at funeral after funeral of dead protestors. Sometimes it was sung so frequently on those days it was like it stopped being a song and became a continual dirge, a lament no one felt it was safe to stop singing. And, of course, it was also sung in the prisons, a final show of defiance by activists as they were marched to the gallows, and who tried to keep singing until the moment the trapdoor fell away beneath their feet.

The apartheid government bizarrely played its own part in promoting the song, when in the sixties it created the Bantustans – nominally independent countries whose real aim was to remove black people's claims to South African soil (the idea being that people became citizens of those countries, and lost their South African citizenship). Two of these, Transkei and Ciskei, were allowed to use ‘Nkosi' as their ‘national anthem', something I can only think the apartheid government signed off on because it felt the move would nullify the song's political power and end its association with the ANC. It did not. In truth, there was little the apartheid government could have done to stop the song's progress anyway. Even if it had made ‘Nkosi' illegal and somehow made everyone so afraid of singing it they wouldn't even do so in church where it could be interpreted as just a hymn like any other, it would have still leaked into the population's consciousness thanks to neighbouring countries taking it up. In 1961, Tanzania adopted a Swahili version of the song as its anthem. Zambia followed suit three years later, although it commissioned its own English lyrics (‘Stand and sing for Zambia, proud and free'). Zimbabwe also used the melody of ‘Nkosi' as its anthem during the 1980s, while Namibia did for a short time after its independence. (No one I spoke to had any problems with this musical sharing; just like few Liechtensteiners I met really had a problem with their anthem having the same tune as ‘God Save the Queen'.) By the 1980s, ‘Nkosi' had also been taken up by rebellious white teenagers throughout the country, who asked to sing it in school choirs, knowing full well it would annoy their parents. A white rock band, Bright Blue, even managed to smuggle its melody into one of that decade's biggest hits, ‘Weeping' – remarkably, the government's radio censors failed to notice.

Of course, there were plenty of other important songs during apartheid – many of which were far more emotional, inspiring and fun than ‘Nkosi'. While travelling around the country, whenever I asked people what music they remembered most from that time, the first thing they all said was the
toyi-toyi
– a dance people would do in the townships, often while rushing towards the South African army who'd come to control them, while shouting ‘Za! Za!' in mimicry of guns going off. Sometimes they'd sing as they danced, largely about how they were going to find some guns and kill the Boer.

But as all those songs came and went, ‘Nkosi' stayed. It reminded everyone just how long the fight had been going on and it gave them hope God would eventually intervene on their side. In 1996, Mandela opened a monument to Enoch Sontonga – a huge granite block on the likely site of grave number 4,885 in Braamfontein Cemetery in Johannesburg – and tried to explain what the song meant to him. Mandela wasn't normally a great public speaker, to put it mildly, so long-winded and verbose at times his audience would drift off, but he got it right that day. ‘What a hymn it is,' he said, ‘this simple appeal for national redemption, for continental salvation … It is the torch that has lit our way … that even as we fall, we hand on, one to the other, to the end of time.' All right, he actually went on for several more minutes, repeating his point endlessly, the way only Mandela could, but you can see his deep love for this song; his belief that Enoch Sontonga gave the anti-apartheid struggle its voice.

Of course, while black South Africa had its anthem, South Africa itself had one too: ‘Die Stem' (‘The Call'). It was written in 1918 by Cornelis Langenhoven – a man who it's easy to get a horrendous impression of despite the almost universal acclaim he receives to this day. Cornelis was a lawyer, newspaper editor, politician and author whose main aim in life seemed to be to promote the use of Afrikaans; to first ensure its survival against English, and then to make it blossom. He had the bushy moustache, shining eyes and laugh lines of a favourite uncle, he thrilled people with the ghost stories and satire that he wrote, and he was renowned for his wit (he once said in parliament that ‘half the people here are baboons'; when the Speaker ordered him to retract, he replied, ‘Okay, half the people here are not baboons'). But he was also a drunkard and an adulterer, and he didn't exactly have an enlightened view on race relations – he was, for instance, the author of the ‘Black Manifesto', one of the more infamous documents in South African political history, which warned of an ‘impending flood of barbarism' and claimed the country was about to become a ‘black Kaffir state'. Admittedly he was asked to write it by other politicians, but he gave their ideas such urgency and power that you could argue he's the reason some white Afrikaners saw racial segregation as so essential to their survival. (In Cape Town, I met Cornelis's grandson, a kindly ninety-year-old mathematician called Guillaume Brümmer, who told me at length about all of this, not trying to hide any of it despite the obvious pain it caused him, insisting Cornelis was warm and a pleasure to be with despite it all. ‘Maybe if he'd travelled more and met more black people,' he said, trying to think of ways his character might have turned out differently.)

But despite those appalling marks against him, you only have to take the shortest glance at Cornelis's anthem to realise he loved South Africa as much as anyone and that he had an ability to express it that many would envy (Mandela was one of those who reportedly did). ‘Die Stem' is one of the few anthems about a country's landscape that doesn't sound trite. ‘From the blues of our heavens, / From the depths of our seas, / Over our everlasting mountains, / Where the cliffs answer our calls,' it starts. That might not be the best, but by the end it's filled with line after line of genuinely beautiful poetry, words some countries could never inspire. Just take this from the third verse: