How artistes disguised songs to beat apartheid 

In apartheid South Africa, censors were ready to ban books, songs, art and even people who expressed anything against the racial segregation and gross injustice of the time.

The apartheid regime had its sensors attuned to tap protest music to nip the “expressions of discontent or dissent” in the bud.

So repressive was the system that a White South African musician like Penelope Jane Dunlop (PJ Powers) was banned for a year in 1988 for performing at a charity event for war orphans in Zimbabwe, where she shared the stage with exiled artistes like Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte. Makeba had to subversively distribute her songs after many of them were banned.

Lucky Dube’s first reggae album, Rastas Never Dies (1984), was banned for criticising the apartheid system. Then he hid nothing in War and Crime and Together As One, in which he strongly criticised the apartheid regime.

“Too many people hate apartheid, why do you like it… the cats and the dogs have forgiven each other, what’s wrong with us,” Dube, who was shot by carjackers in October 2007, crooned.

Both songs were banned until a White-owned radio station played Together As One that the censors moved on.

The censors were not just after native musicians. British rock musician Peter Gabriel released Biko in 1980, three years after the murder of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Gabriel sings poignantly about Biko’s death over fitting ominous horns. He doesn’t just mourn the death of Biko, he goes on to note that his ideologies would live forever.

“We had to change the lyrics but the listeners would understand exactly what we were trying to say although the censors wouldn’t understand,” Pat Shange said in 2009.

Some musicians took to writing songs in their native dialects and the police would not understand the lyrics. “These blacks can really sing,” they would say as the toyi-toyi, a high-stepping dance, would be brought to full force.

For instance, Meadowlands, written by Strike Vilakazi in 1956, captures the pain of the former residents of Sophiatown who were forcibly removed from their homes near Johannesburg and placed in the distant township of Meadowlands as part of racial segregation.

The lyrics, sung in native dialects, ambiguously expressed their resistance to being moved to Meadowlands and were cleverly recorded over jive music. This confused the censors who interpreted the song as being supportive of their programme.

Oblivious to the actual meaning, Meadowlands received national airplay on radio stations across South Africa.
 
Mandela to Manelo
But it was not the same for Chicco. There was no chance the name Mandela would be allowed in a song. But there was a plan. Just a bit of ingenuity and they came out with We Miss You Manelo.

Chicco did not just twist the title but weaved his message around a domestic theme, complete with a seemingly innocuous video that tells the story of a teenage girl, Manelo, who gets herself knocked-up and eventually runs away from her very angry parents.

Later, Manelo’s parents reflect on their decision and are distraught over her continual absence. Chicco belts out the refrain, “We miss you Manelo, where are you?”

The apartheid censors never got that one but the black community for whom the song was produced got the message.

Music reflects the joys, sorrows, hopes and despair of the people whose lived experiences constitute the subject matter of the songs.

In a time of injustice, communities like in South Africa used songs to bond and to agitate for their best. Like in the film, Sarafina (1992) where songs like Nkonyane Nkanaba, the Morning Prayer that cascades into a Mbaquanga song, or even Freedom is Coming Tomorrow are used in both happy and sad moments to vivid effect.

More subtleties 
Yvonne Chaka Chaka also had to find a secret touch with her music. In 2015, she told an arts and culture magazine, Black Roses, while in Kenya that she would write songs and then rewrite them to hide direct messages.

Her song, Let Him Go, was originally composed for Mandela. “The message said let him go to his children and family but obviously I couldn’t say let Mandela go—I’d have gone to jail, so we changed the song’s packaging to be about a woman loving another woman’s man—you are always there when he needs you, where is he now? Let him go.”

The subtle message passed the censors, as would I Cry For Freedom whose title must have had the regime’s ears cocked up. With this one, Chaka Chaka had it ready but the national broadcaster South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) could not play its original lyrics.

She was forced to change the lyrics and had to battle with the idea of balancing the new message with the original.

“It became a song about women empowerment and against women abuse,” she said.

Motherland was about South Africa and Africa. Produced in 1989, its lyrics were directed at the coloniser: “Who’s that man calling me stranger in my motherland?” Yvonne says.

Chaka Chaka was at her soulful best, evoking all the sorrows even as the song appeared to draw the censors away to just another mundane message about a motherland.

But her most creative nous is probably heard in Stimela. The song echoes the impatience of the people for the train of change to arrive.

Released in the 1987 album, Sangoma, Stimela (the native way of calling a steam engine) tells the story of the people waiting for a train at the station. But Chaka Chaka says they are running impatient because the train is delaying to take them to their freedom.

Returning home from a day-long work is like freedom itself yet the freedom here was more real than imagined.

Chaka Chaka knocks this one down with the laid back refrain, “Thina Sijathile” (we are calm), as if to implore the South Africans to be calm because the cushoo-cushoo of the stimela is bringing freedom.

Jo’Anna or Joburg?
For Pat Shange, most South Africans took My Neighbour (1987) for the story of divides. The song is about social problems communities face as a man complains about his neighbour’s anti-social habits.

A neighbour threatening to call the police over a hen jumping the fence to his side ideally typifies the 1940s and 1950s violence against black South Africans that was passed in the Group Areas Act and “pass laws” to restrict the movement of black people in certain areas.

But it is in Sweet Mama (1985) that Pat Shange really emerges with something unique. 

He said he wanted to draw people away from the suffering with something light like love. Sweet Mama has Pat Shange singing about a beautiful woman who floors him at a club, leaving him yearning for her to come home with him.

The romantic touch is alluring but the political undertone is unmistakable because the beautiful woman is South Africa and she is cavorting with the apartheid regime.

It is this kind of message that Lucky Dube has in How Do I Know (If she loves me – 1986). Dube had faced the wrath of the censors with his first reggae album and his War and Crimes, too, suffered because he explicitly asked to “burn down apartheid, fight down racial discrimination.”

So in the subtle love song, he uses South Africa as the lady that he loves so much, is always in his mind but he is told she is in love with another guy in town.

Just like South Africa was in love with the apartheid regime.

The song, with its heavy metal driven by soothing vocals, scored well but Dube was a Rasta man and he was determined not to back down entirely.

Like Peter Gabriel, Guyanese-British musician, Eddy Grant, had to subtly hide the intensity of his reggae anthem, Gimme Hope Jo’anna in the late 1980s.

The song was banned for its anti-regime sentiments, but still resonated enormously with the people. It reached number seven on the UK Singles Chart, becoming Grant’s first Top 10 hit in more than five years.

The original lyrics had a lot of Mandela in it, which was a no-go subject. Eddy Grant changed things and Jo’anna became not a woman but a reference to Johannesburg and the apartheid government.

“Well, Jo’anna she runs a country, she makes a few of her people happy. She don’t care about the rest at all. She’s got a system they call apartheid; it keeps a brother in a subjection.”

The refrain that follows originally asked Mandela to give South Africans hope.

Like Pat Shange admitted that he had to hide the political undertones in his I’m Accused (for something I didn’t do) in social issues, musicians in the apartheid era had to double their creativity to blend with the agitation for freedom.

Sub Editor: Eva Kyomugisha