• DOI:10.1080/00020180500139015
• Corpus ID: 145099483

God rock Africa: Thoughts on politics in popular black performance in South Africa

@article{Coplan2005GodRA,
  title={God rock Africa: Thoughts on politics in popular black performance in South Africa},
  author={David B. Coplan},
  journal={African Studies},
  year={2005},
  volume={64},
  pages={27 - 9}
}

• D. Coplan
• Published 1 July 2005
• Art
• African Studies

This article is simply a personal reflection, after three decades of “participantobservation” on what has happened to both the idea and the expression of the political imagination in the popular music of black South African youth in the time of freedom. “Post-apartheid era” is the accepted standard phrase, but I thought it might be less wearisome if I did not try to hold up my affective trousers with the “A word” (even if, like an unpaid bill, it is supposed to be in the post) from the start. Thanks to our people, great and small, we are today enjoying more than just “post-apartheid” in South Africa. Yet we must not, at the same time, forget how dire was the repression of the performing arts here not so long ago, nor the dogged, ultimately successful struggle by performers to overcome it; a situation powerfully described in Gwen Ansell’s recent volume, Soweto Blues (Ansell 2004:109–177). Indeed, the political premise from which many of the most talented and committed artists of that time proceeded is summarised in a comment by South Africa’s most distinguished stage actor and theatrical personality, John Kani. As Kani observed in an interview in the dark days of 1975, black performing artists could be thankful for apartheid, because it produced