“This is Not A Song, It’s An Outburst” : How Musical Moral Entrepreneurship Fueled the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement

Abstract

Challenging traditionally-conceived narratives surrounding the dialectic of Apartheid, many Afrikaners became facilitators of in-state resistance alongside their black peers after becoming disillusioned with the South African regime’s foreign policy initiatives during the 1970s and 1980s. Afrikaner men were conscripted to fight in their country’s dirty wars in Rhodesia and Angola, which destabilized the regime’s legally-enshrined white privilege and fueled resistance expressed through musical movement. This idea connects to tactics used by the American government to assert racialist sovereignty as a tenet of stratifying South Africa’s domestic society through soft power. This paper demonstrates through semantic and musical deconstructions how and why Paul Simon’s “Graceland” project and the Voëlvry punk movement worked to dismantle tenets of racial governance at the grassroots level in South Africa. From the usage of the English language to the usage of Western instrumentation with “reclaimed” rhythm, these cases show a broader yet calculated transgression from mediatic expressions of Apartheid through moral entrepreneurship.